Meridian Surgery

Thank you very much for such an insightful and encouragement comment. Best wishes Dr Irma Murjikneli

I am very sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience with flu vaccination. This year, for the first time Health Protection Agency told us that there will be two different vaccines dividing patients into groups of under and over 65. In addition to this, we were only allowed to have vaccines in smaller batches. We had 700 vaccines delivered few weeks before and another 400 delivered just before that Saturday. Due to media alert stating that that NHS may not have enough vaccines, we had high number of patients coming in for flu jabs prior to that Saturday. However, we still had 600 vaccines left for over 65s for the Saturday, which would have been more than enough if we looked at the numbers in the previous years. Once again, due to media scare we had over 700 patients coming through the door on that Saturday and unfortunately have run out of our stock. Health Protection Agency has now sent us another 700 vaccines so please feel free to contact us to arrange an appointment for flu vaccine if it is still required. Best wishes Dr Irma Murjikneli

I am sorry to hear that you had a bad experience to book an appointment for the afternoon clinic. In our appointment system we have pre-bookable and book on the day appointments. Pre-bookable appointments open up 2 weeks in advance and get filled up quite quickly. Book on the day appointments are divided into morning and afternoon appointments. Morning appointments open up at 08:30 and afternoon appointments open up at 14:00. This is to make sure that people who suddenly become unwell are able to get an appointment with us. Some of the pre-bookable, as well as book on the day appointments are allocated for patients to book from online access. We continuously make changes to our appointment system to make it more accessible for patients, but unfortunately we struggle to meet the demand, which is a nationwide problem currently. If you want to discuss this problem further please contact our patient services manager to arrange meeting with me. Best wishes Dr Irma Murjikneli

I am very sorry to hear that you had such difficulties with making an appointment. As a general rule no GP surgeries are open on bank holidays or weekends. However, we do offer once a month Saturday morning clinic with two of our GPs and a nurse. I am sorry that information about bank holiday closure was not on the website and about the error message on the answer machine. I will speak to our admin team about those. We are continuously working towards improving access and providing more appointments, more telephone lines, but this is a very difficult task. As you may be aware, this is a problem across the country, lack of GPs, lack of appointments, increasing demand and workload. Our online booking portal is managed by System One. If you let us know what sort of changes you are looking for we can pass your feedback to them. You can provide this feedback through our website or in writing. Best wishes Dr Irma Murjikneli

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment. We are very pleased to hear that Maggie put you at ease. We have passed your kind comments on to her. Thanks once again, Meridian Surgery