How to Make and Cancel an Appointment

Problems booking online appointments?

Use the Patient Access Support Centre before you call us.

The Triage System

At this Practice we operate a Triage System which means when you call for an appointment you will be asked to give very brief details of why you need an appointment and for a contact phone number. All information given by you to any of the Medical Centre staff will be dealt with in total confidence. Your call will then be logged and a Doctor or Nurse Practitioner will call you back to assess your problem and make an appointment for you if appropriate.

This system has several advantages:

• Telephones calls are answered quickly
• Your problem may be dealt with by the phone call
• If you need an appointment you will be seen by the most – appropriate healthcare professional.
• You will always speak to a Doctor or Nurse Practitioner

Call Recording

Please note telephone calls are recorded for training and monitoring purposes.

Can’t keep your appointment?

It  is important that you  let us know if you cannot keep an appointment as we may be able to offer it to another patient. This can be done by phone or by text (see SMS Text Messaging System below)

On arrival at the medical centre

Please ensure you check-in at reception or use the Self Check-in Screen. Failure to do so may result in a missed appointment

SMS Messaging System

The University Medical Centre is able to offer a Text Appointment Reminder service.   Through this we are able to send you a reminder of your  forthcoming appointment by texting it straight to your mobile telephone. We can also send you urgent messages regarding such things as your results or prescriptions.

The reminder will advise you of the time and date of your appointment and the clinician you will be seeing. so that you can schedule the rest of your busy day around it. Please note that no charge will be incurred by you for this service.
If you find that you can not keep the appointment it gives you the opportunity to cancel the appointment by text to enable to re-allocate the appointment to  another patient.  This text will be charged at your providers standard rate.

One of the benefits for using this reminder system is that it will help us to reduce the number of missed appointments which are a terrible waste of resources. By cutting down on these missed appointments we will be able to offer a wider choice of appointments to those people who need to be seen at short notice. We would also like to use this method to invite you to make health promotion appointments and offer advice.

In order to provide this service to you, we will need to have your correct mobile phone number on our records – if you have changed it go to our Change of Details page and you can make the most of this service.