Choosing the Right Service and how Online Access works
Immediate action required: Pharmacy First has launched
You may have seen in the news about Pharmacy First and the new range of conditions pharmacists can now treat directly.
This is now available at Boots in Padstow and Allied Pharmacy in St Columb Major.
Pharmacy First will enable community pharmacists to supply prescription-only medicines, including antibiotics and antivirals where clinically appropriate, to treat seven common health conditions without the need to visit a GP.
What are the seven common conditions?
What are the seven common conditions?
Urgent advice: What are the seven common conditions?
Sinusitis
Sore throat
Earache
Infected insect bite
Impetigo (a bacterial skin infection)
Shingles
Uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women.
How can I access treatment from my pharmacy?
You can get treatment for these conditions by walking into the pharmacy or contacting them virtually. As your GP practice we can also refer directly to the pharmacy if your symptoms are suitable.
Non-urgent advice: How does it work?
What will happen when I arrive at the pharmacy?
The pharmacist will be able to speak to you privately in a separate consultation room. They may perform an examination or ask to access your medical records. The pharmacist will be able to recommend the best course of action on an individual patient basis, including by issuing prescriptions for antibiotics or antivirals where necessary.
Usual prescription charges will apply for the seven common conditions. Patients that were already exempt from prescription charges will still be exempt.
To find out more:
Choose the right service
- aches and pains
- sore throat
- coughs
- colds
- flu
- earache
- cystitis
- skin rashes
- teething
- red eye
- emergency contraception
- minor infections
- diarrhoea
- bites and stings
- Sprains
- Strains
- Broken Bones
- Minor head injuries
- Minor scalds or burns
Follow this link for your nearest and their current waiting times.
NHS Quicker App
This free app provides live waiting and travel times for NHS services providing urgent care across Devon and Cornwall (South West). NHSquicker provides information about the healthcare services available to you based on your location, helping you to choose the right service and spend less time waiting.
The combined travel and waiting times estimate how long it will take you to be seen by each service. Our emergency departments are busy, and often for a minor injury, you could be seen quicker elsewhere. Please remember to always ring 999 in a life-threatening
Find the app in the Google Play
Or in the Apple store
How you contact has changed
We now ask all patients to use our online consultation form called Klinik via our website.
This service is only available to patients registered with Petroc Group Practice. The practice opening hours are from 8:30 until 6pm. The Klinik for will be available between 8.30 am to 12 pm. Please make sure to complete your form and submit before the closure time or your information will be lost. We may need to close the Klinik online form earlier during times of high demand. Our phone lines will still be open during this time, and urgent requests can be processed through Klinik by our care navigating team on your behalf.
Our clinical team aim to review all clinical enquiries that are submitted before 4 pm on the same working day, and you will be contacted in due course as appropriate. Clinically urgent enquiries will be prioritised, but we may ask you to contact another service, or attend A&E if necessary. Any routine queries regarding ongoing chronic conditions, will be triaged and given appointments according to need.
We are contractually obliged to have an online patient contact system. The reasons we have chosen to implement the Klinik system:
- Klinik is very user friendly. The layout of the system should make it easy to highlight patients’ issues and the questions asked are more relevant to specific issues.
- Questions asked are less repetitive.
- Klinik is more individualised and the responses you give will affect the questions the system asks.
- Klinik is also personalised to our surgery rather than a generic questionnaire.
- Klinik allows all incoming consultations to be triaged and assessed fairly.
Everybody contacting the surgery will go through the Klinik process, ideally completing the online form themselves. Any patients contacting the surgery by phone or in person, will be asked to go online. If patients do not have access to the internet, our reception team will take their name and contact details and a call back arranged so that one of our team can guide them through the process over the telephone.
Our aim is to make access to our appointments safe, fair and based on clinical priority. For these reasons, we will be using Klinik, an NHS approved, online sorting (“triage”) system. Triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to decide the order of treatment for a large number of patients.
The Klinik Forms are sent to our doctors working in our Klinik duty team, to be triaged and patients will be contacted with the triage outcome either by a GP or Care Navigation team in due course.
We, like most practices around the country, are dealing with an unprecedented demand and we hope that this change will help us to manage that demand and improve patient experience.
How will Klinik work?
Long phone waiting times are unsatisfactory for patients and the reception team. We want all patients to have the same opportunity to access our services whilst preserving the ability to prioritise clinical need.
You will be able to access Klinik via our website to submit appointment requests. As the screenshot below shows, you will be able to send medication queries, request fit notes, medical reports, and much more.
Using the online form is the quickest and most efficient way for you to tell us about a medical problem. You will not require a login or password to access Klinik. Please be assured that the online form is not the only way to access our care. You can still call us or come to our surgery and our reception team will guide you through the process.
Klinik tiles
If you have a new medical problem...
The system will take you through a series of questions. If you are unable to access or use Klinik online, the reception team will ask you the same questions and will input your answers on your behalf. Depending on the nature of your main symptom you will be asked some further questions. This will help us direct your request to the right person and make sure urgent problems are highlighted quickly. We will have a ‘duty team’ including an experienced GP reviewing new submissions throughout the day and acting on them as appropriate. This may mean they telephone you for more information, arrange a telephone consultation, send you a text, book a face-to-face consultation or schedule a home visit.
If you want to request a follow-up for a previous medical problem…
Use the ‘ongoing health problem’ option if your symptoms haven't improved. You will be asked to fill in some details and you may want to include information about why you need follow-up, who your last appointment was with, and how long ago it was.
Will I be able to see a GP?
One of our central aims is to prioritise continuity of care. If you have a long-term problem or need routine follow-up with a specific clinician, your query will be reviewed by the team and actioned according to clinical need. Another strength of this new approach is that we have oversight of all daily requests for appointments, and this will help make sure your appointment is with an appropriately qualified health professional. This may not be a GP. We are lucky enough to have a broad multi-disciplinary team including advanced practitioners, practice nurses, health care assistants, musculoskeletal practitioners, advanced nurse practitioners, social prescribing link workers and clinical pharmacists working at the practice.
Why did we decide to introduce Klinik?
The traditional “one size fits all” model of general practice is no longer working. Some patients value continuity of care with a known clinician. Others want quick and easy access to healthcare. Demands on our clinical team have been significant and increasing. We are using technology more and more in our everyday lives - video calling to catch up with our families, online banking apps to transfer money to friends, and ordering the weekly supermarket shop online.
The Klinik tool brings a digital option for patients to quickly and easily input details about their health problems without the need to be on hold for a long period of time. We hope that Klinik will bring improvements for patients and staff alike.
Arriving late for your appointment
Please note if you are running late for an appointment, we may not be able to see you and need to rearrange your appointment.
We ask that you plan to arrive in plenty of time for your appointment, allowing enough time to park and to book in.
Be aware that during the summer months the roads can be busier, and it may take you longer to get to us than normal.
We appreciate that we sometimes run over with our clinics, due to medical emergencies, and that these are inconvenient, however, they are outside of our control. We can rearrange your appointment if you are unable to wait.