Stowhealth

I am very sorry to hear that you had difficulty in booking your smear appointment, please can you provide me with more information, so that I can look into that for you.
We have plenty of availability Tuesday - Saturday. Did you try to call us or make the appointment through our Askmygp service? We would welcome a conversation to understand what had happened in this instance

Please be assured that many attempts have been made, (and continue to be made) to improve patient access to the building. Unfortunately Stowhealth do not own Violet Hill House, we along with several other users are tenants to the property. Because of this, we are very restricted as to what we can do to the exterior of the building.

We have looked at many temporary shelters, but as we cannot fix anything to the building, we are unable to make them safe – which is a health and safety problem, especially in the adverse weather conditions we have experienced of late. There is also the difficulty of providing a big enough structure to allow for social distancing coupled with the issues of having to remove it every night and erect it again every morning.

We are lucky that the building does have an overhang which gives some shelter at the front of the building for patients to wait for their prescriptions. Extra staff have been employed to try to speed up the process of bringing medication out to patients, to help cut down on waiting times. There is also a free prescription delivery service that we now run for many of our dispensing patients (conditions apply) to avoid them having to visit us and waiting.

In addition, we have also arranged allocated car parking directly in front of the Blood Test clinics, so patients can easily wait in their cars until called.

This past year has been an incredible challenge for all building users within Violet Hill House, but we are proud that we have managed to continue to provide a safe place for patients to come to throughout this pandemic.

We certainly look forward to a time when waiting outside will not be required, but for the time being our main priority is to keep patients and staff safe – and Covid out. One positive case could easily lead to our whole surgery down being closed down.

Finally, may we also point out that Stowhealth currently have 6 GP Partners and 6 Salaried GP’s at Stowhealth, with one more joining us very soon.

Thank you for comments and we are sorry that you have been dissatisfied with the service.
AskmyGP is a relatively new service that we offer which was designed to help improve patient access and to enable the team to deal with most queries on the same day. The overall response to this service has been very positive.

We understand that some people may not have access to the internet, so our telephone lines are still very much open for patients to call. Our reception team, who are trained Care Navigators, will ask patients for a brief description for the reason of their call, to ensure they are directed to most appropriate clinician. This also enables the clinician to prioritise their calls.

During the past year, more consultations have been via telephone, email or video where possible, rather than face to face, for patient safety. Please be assured that if a patient needs to be seen that arrangements will be made for them to come into the practice.

We are all looking forward to the time that we can welcome more patients back into the surgery.

Thank you for your comments and we are sorry to hear of the problems you have experienced with AskmyGP. If you are still having problems with the system please do not hesitate to contact us and we will arrange for one of our administrators to call you to help talk you through the process.

We are sorry to hear of the difficulties you have experienced in contacting the surgery. The easiest and quickest way to contact us is via AskmyGP, which is available from a link on the front page of our website. We aim to respond to your query within a couple of hours.

If you would like any help in using this system please do not hesitate to contact us and we will arrange for an administrator to call you back.

Please accept our apologies for the problems you encountered using the AskmyGP service. If you would like to contact the surgery with your details, we will gladly look into this for you.