ROUTINE APPOINTMENTS

All our appointments are for ten minutes, and are for one person and preferably for one problem. You may book an appointment by phone, or by calling in. If your preferred doctor is not available for the time you wish to come you may be offered an appointment with another doctor.

Please be aware that several of our GPs work part-time so may not be available when you wish to come. Please help our staff to help you by seeing another doctor if that is the case.

Appointments may be booked with the Practice Nurses for chronic disease checks (routine monitoring of blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, asthma and stroke patients), immunisations, travel injections, routine smear tests, wound dressing and stitch removal, dietary advice and new patient checks.

Our health care assistants will see patients needing INR blood tests, blood pressure checks and other routine health checks.

DOCTORS APPOINTMENT TIMES

Appointments are offered during the following times:

Please note that a Healthcare Assistant may be present during consultations with Dr Ali. If you would prefer to see the doctor without the healthcare assistant please make this known.

EMERGENCY APPOINTMENTS

We have emergency appointments available Monday to Friday during both morning and afternoon sessions. These important slots are only for genuine urgent medical problems. Only you can determine if it is urgent and that you need to have an appointment the same day.

Our staff may ask you what is wrong to try and give guidance as to who you should see and when but they always leave the decision to you and you have the right to refuse to give details.

If you do request an emergency slot and the doctor seeing you deems this not to be urgent, you will be asked to make a routine appointment and your problem will not be dealt with.

Due to the nature of emergency appointments and the high demand, we cannot run to exact timings and you may experience a long wait. For an emergency slot you will be seen as soon as possible with patients being prioritised by arrival time and clinical need. This is not the case for routine appointments.

If we are unable to offer you an emergency appointment at the Surgery, Ilkeston Community Hospital has a family walk-in centre where GPs are available until 8pm seven days a week.

CANCELLING AN APPOINTMENT

If you have made an appointment with us but then find you cannot make it, please let us know. This allows us to rebook it for someone else. Even if it is near to the appointment time if you cancel, we can use the slot for an emergency patient.

Repeated non-attendances without informing us seriously impacts on the running of the practice.

OUT OF HOURS COVER

In an emergency please ring the usual number. An answering machine will give you a number to call. Emergency calls should only be for a problem that cannot wait until the next surgery time.