"Disastrous communication system"

Klinik can identify a primary health issue, recognise its urgency and direct the patient to the right point of care in the most appropriate timescale. It is a registered medical device with a unique algorithm that interprets the patient’s symptoms, into a set of differential diagnoses and estimates the urgency of the care needed. The depth of information that the system gathers from the patient is a crucially important part of this. It also provides important background information for healthcare professionals and enables proactive interaction with the patient immediately.

It will help us to provide a much fairer patient experience as it removes barriers to accessing healthcare. Appointments have traditionally been booked on a “first come first served basis” meaning that sometimes patients with an urgent clinical need may have been asked to “call back tomorrow” once the on the day capacity had been reached. The Klinik system will help us to triage based on clinical urgency rather than the time of day that the request was made so if your clinical need is more urgent than someone else, your need will be prioritised.

On completion of a submission, you will receive an automated response advising you that your request has been received by the practice and that if the clinical triage decision is that a routine appointment is appropriate then the practice staff will contact you within 2 weeks in order to organise a routine appointment for you. Those patients deemed by a clinician to need immediate attention will be contacted on the day of submission.

Pembroke Medical Group has an increasing multi-disciplinary team of clinicians, the GP led care navigation team may direct you to a GP, Nurse Practitioner, Clinical Pharmacist, Physiotherapist, Paramedic, or Social Prescriber depending on your clinical need. Triaging requests using the online tool ensures that we match the appropriate clinician within our team to the patient need.

The current demand on General Practice means we have to triage every request we receive, so we can prioritise those who need the most urgent help, in order to keep all our patients safe. Unfortunately, this means at times of particularly increased demand, the wait for a routine appointment can be 4-5 weeks. This remains below the national average.

There are times when we will not have an appointment to offer you, this is not the service we strive to offer, but we, like many other Practices in the UK, are struggling to meet the current level of demand for our services. We will continue to do our best each day to deliver as many appointments as it is safe to do so. Ultimately, we do not have unlimited resources and are currently working to maximum safe capacity.

We are working extremely hard and we can guarantee that the staff and doctors at the practice will continue to work as hard as they can to deliver the best service they are able to provide within the limitation of the resources at our disposal.