Park Road Surgery

37 Park Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0AU

Telephone: 020 8977 5481

We're open

Face to face appointments

Posted on May 27th, 2021

We are aware of NHS England’s announcement, in the papers today, about patients being “entitled” to a face-to-face appointment if they prefer.

As a practice, we have constantly adapted how we work to the pandemic. We moved to telephone consulting by default in early March 2020, weeks before NHSE had begun to think about primary care or about that approach. Similarly, we’ve already started bringing more of you in face-to-face when we think what you’re calling about is better handled that way; last week, on Friday 7th May, we added six more conditions to the growing list which can ‘bypass’ the telephone, and we’re currently seeing 100-150 patients a day face-to-face.

Blanket statements like NHSE’s today are unhelpful, ill-informed, and dangerous. Many of you will know that for close to two decades now we’ve been trying to move premises to somewhere big enough for our list size, and that the current building we have is less than 30% of what we should have per NHSE’s own guidance. In the latter part of this week, we’ve had to leave some of you queueing outside the building to avoid overcrowding the waiting room; although rates of Covid are low locally and nationally, social distancing rules have not been relaxed, under which we have an obligation under health and safety regulations to work to see patients safely. That legal obligation is not changed by a press release.

As such, we will continue to offer face-to-face appointments as much as we safely can. You may be asked to talk to someone on the phone before coming in; if so, that’s a clinical decision based on our assessment of how we can best meet your needs, as it always has been, and we would ask that you trust our judgement, accepting that it may mean a phone call and then a face-to-face appointment.

There are some things you can do to help. If you’re attending the surgery, please attend on your own unless absolutely necessary. If you’re bringing a child or relative in for an appointment, please limit yourself to one carer/parent per patient, as we cannot safely accommodate three people per appointment in the waiting room.

Please wear a facemask. If you feel you’re exempt, let reception know at the door, and the doctor seeing you will decide whether your medical needs and the current situation in the practice mean you can safely be seen inside the surgery or whether you’ll need to be seen outside; this may require rescheduling your appointment to a time when there are fewer people in the building.

If you do attend the surgery, please wait outside until the time of your appointment. We have asked reception not to let people into the building before then, again to limit the number of people waiting inside in an enclosed space. We’re conscious that the weather may not be great – unfortunately that is not something we can control, so all we can do is apologise if you are waiting in the rain.

We continue to be grateful for the extraordinary support we’ve had from the whole community throughout the pandemic, and for the hard work we are all putting in to moving back to a more normal way of working and living.

Opening Times

  • Monday
    08:30am to 08:00pm
    (Extended Hours: 18:30 - 20:00)
  • Tuesday
    08:30am to 06:30pm
  • Wednesday
    07:00am to 06:30pm
    (Extended Hours: 07:00 - 08:00)
  • Thursday
    08:30am to 06:30pm
  • Friday
    07:00am to 06:30pm
    (Extended Hours: 07:00 - 08:00)
  • Saturday
    CLOSED
  • Sunday
    CLOSED
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