Shepley Health Centre

We are sorry that you have felt the need to complain and in particular using this platform, rather than contacting us and discussing your concerns with us directly.
We do appreciate that some elderly people are housebound and by definition never leave their homes. We have processes in place to address urgent needs via home visit requests for those patients truly housebound and these patients can have blood tests at home provided by the Locala nursing team.
We cannot easily manage requests for home visits for patients who are able to leave their homes for other reasons, with the assistance of family members or purely have transport issues. These patients aren’t housebound. In these situations we would look to work with patients and their carers to determine a suitable time that they can be brought to the surgery with the assistance they require. Many of our patients use a local charity who provide a subsidised taxi service for people in the locality requiring help getting to appointments.
We appreciate that the location of the practice is not on any direct public transport services, which can make it difficult for those without their own transport. In some cases patients choose to change their surgery to other local surgeries with a more direct transport link.
If the clinician was happy for you to wait two weeks for a blood test that was based on clinical assessment at the time. If clinicians feel a blood test is required urgently, it is usually accommodated within 48 hours.
I hope this goes some way to addressing the concerns that you raise.

We are sorry you have felt the need to complain using this platform rather than approaching us directly. It is true that the role of a Doctor's receptionist is extremely demanding and across the country GP surgeries are dealing with unprecedented demand, for which the receptionists are the first port of call for many. To address some of the issues regarding demand we have installed a cloud based phone system to try and ease some pressures for reception. Clinically we have increased nursing hours, an additional Advanced Nurse Practitioner and we have become a GP Registrar training practice to provide additional appointments. I can assure you the GP's do not hide in their cosy little offices. The number of patients in the waiting room does not reflect the amount of work there is to do. Visits, emergencies, referrals, reviewing results, staff support, debriefing, mandatory training, online consultation requests, patient queries are just a few of the things that that the whole clinical team are involved with on a daily basis. I hope this information is useful as I appreciate patients cannot be expected to know what other work there is to do in general practice.