Appointments

We operate primarily a ‘Same Day Booking' Appointment System and will endeavour to see everyone who requires an appointment on the same day.

Urgent medical problems will always be accommodated but please ensure the receptionist knows you feel you have an urgent medical problem.

5 appointments of each surgery every morning and  2 every evening, except on Mondays, can be booked up to a week ahead.

All other appointments are booked by phoning each weekday morning from 8.30am. We advise  you to phone as soon as possible from 8.30 am if you need a same day appointment.  You may hit the engaged tone but keep trying as usually about 30 appointments are made in the first 30 minutes!

HOT TIP*

If your problem is not so urgent please do try to avoid Mondays which are always very busy.

CANCELLING APPOINTMENTS:  If you have an appointment more than 24 hours in advance that you wish to cancel you can let us know by clicking here.

GP Appointments (can be subject to change)

**Dr Kearsey and Dr Leary alternately provide a late surgery on Monday evenings up till 7.50 every week.  This is primarily intended to assist working people who find it difficult to attend at other times due to work and commuting commitments.

Practice Nurse Appointments 

Home Visits

Whenever possible requests for a home visit should be received at the Practice no later than 10.00am to allow for a visit that same day.

Home visits will normally be undertaken by the Doctor on-call for that day after morning surgery so we cannot usually stipulate which doctor will visit you.

Home visits are intended only for patients who are housebound because of severe illness or severe disability. They are not made simply because of transport difficulties if the condition itself would not warrant a home visit. 

The doctor may phone initially to assess whether your problem could be dealt with most effectively at the surgery.

Please remember that several patients can be seen in the practice in the time that it takes to make one home visit. There are also much better facilities for examining and treating patients at the Surgery.

A home visit is at the doctor's discretion and is determined by medical assessment of the problem presented. 

How to Request Phone Advice Call

Requests for a telephone call will be entered at the end of the surgery on the morning for that day and should be received at the Practice by 10.00am. Your call will usually be returned after morning surgery between 11.30am. to 3.00pm.

Reception is closed from 12.30pm - 1.30pm but if you have an urgent problem a staff member will be available to take phone calls. 

How to contact us by email - click the red button 

This form is only for use by our patients who are already registered with Lantern Surgery.

It can be used to contact the practice about simple queries, comments & suggestions that are NOT URGENT. 

Simple questions needing yes/no or 1 - 2 line answers are suitable or if you need to convey a simple message. 

More complex queries should be resolved by phoning the surgery. 

A REPLY CAN TAKE UP TO 48 HOURS (two normal working days) though will usually be quicker. 

The form is seen initially by an administrative staff member not a doctor, but may be forwarded to a doctor as appropriate.

Test Results

When you have a test performed by the surgery we will endeavour to contact you if the result means your treatment may need to change or other action might be required.

If the result of the test is normal or your treatment is unchanged we will not usually contact you. Unfortunately we simply have too many results each day to contact everybody who has a normal result. (at least 20 - 30 per day)

However if you contact the surgery after 1.30pm personally for your result, the reception staff will normally have received a simple summary from the doctor that they can give to you. They will NOT be in a position to discuss further details of such results.

Please do not ask the receptionists to try and interpret results for you. They are not qualified to do so and can only tell you what the Doctor has authorised. 

Confidentiality:   We cannot give results to anyone other than the individual they concern - no not even to your spouse or partner!   For similar reasons we will not leave messages on answer-phones as there is no certainty who will hear the message and even the briefest message could lead to a potential breach of confidentiality.

We usually have received and processed test results as follows:

Blood Tests: most results are back within 3 - 4 working days but a few specialised tests can take longer.

XRays and Ultrasound tests: Unfortunately reports for XRays can take up to two weeks to come to us.  This is entirely beyond our control.

We cannot usually tell you about results ordered by a hospital doctor as the results will be sent to that doctor and not normally to us.

Appointments - help us run to time – to save you waiting.

It is inevitable that sometimes we do fail to keep to time for appointments and understandably this is a common source of irritation for our patients. There is however a lot you can do to help us and we hope you will read this information for everybody’s benefit.

In general the NHS expects GPs to deal with your problems within a 10 minute appointment.  This is better than in the past – in the 1980s the average was 6 minutes.  However GPs deal with a lot more time consuming preventative work than in the past. There is a lot more to pack into each consultation – the extra 4 minutes does not compensate!
The problem is not only a UK/NHS issue. Statistics show that in the Spanish Health Service GPs have 6 minutes per patient on average and in Germany 8 minutes so we’re actually doing quite well.

Sometimes delays can be rather unavoidable due to a patient being unexpectedly seriously ill or needing urgent hospital admission. Other times a problem presented is very complicated and time consuming and has to be sorted immediately.  This can lead to subsequent appointments running late. Fortunately such complex and prolonged consultations are relatively rare.

However the much commoner cause of delays is that several patients each surgery simply underestimate how much time their various problems take. Inevitably numerous issues takes very much more than 10 minute leading to delays for the next patients.
 
The following things do cause us problems keeping to time

• Presenting a long list of problems is unlikely to be dealt with effectively in 10 minutes.
• Asking for another person (or more) to be seen ‘while I’m here’ after their own consultation.
• Asking for repeat prescriptions during the consultation.
• Spend 10 minutes talking about a minor problem and then suddenly announce a much more serious problem at the end of the consultation which cannot safely be postponed to another time (the ‘while I am here question’ – almost as leaving the room).
   
  So please – help us help you get the best out of your consultation
   
• If you have several problems summarise them for the doctor briefly at the beginning.  The doctor can then help you prioritise the most urgent or significant issues.  You may probably then need to make a further appointment on another day to deal with the less significant problems. Please understand why the doctor may advise this.
   
• Use your appointment time effectively and help us keep to time for everybody’s benefit by telling us of only one significant problem per consultation. However we can usually deal with 2 simple problems effectively during your appointment. The more you throw at us – the less effective we will be.
   
• Please do be prepared for the doctor to advise that you make a second appointment to discuss the unrelated and less significant issues.  It’s safer for you – and helpful to those following.
   
• Your appointment is for one person only – please don’t ask us to deal with a second person ‘while I am here’.
   
• Please don’t use your consultation time to obtain repeat prescriptions.
   
• If there is a particular letter or result you want to discuss please tell the receptionist in advance so we can see it is available. Unfortunately we can experience very significant delays in receiving letters from hospitals over which we have no control.  (several weeks sometimes)
   
• Finally please don’t answer your mobile phone calls during the consultation . How would you feel if the GP answered theirs?  Please put your phone on ‘silent’ mode.  
  

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dr Sue Kearsey & Dr Roger Leary