We do provide a home visiting service for those patients who are too ill or too frail to attend the surgery. If you need a home visit please phone us before 10:30 (except in genuine emergencies) as this helps our doctors to plan their time efficiently. For callers after this time it may not be possible to arrange a visit for that day. Remember that the surgery is set up to assess patients and we have a much greater range of equipment available at the surgery, such as ECG machines, good lighting, resuscitation facilities and so on, than we can provide to patients in their homes. It may be impossible to examine someone properly at home.

Home visit requests after 10:30 are reserved for genuine emergencies only. In the afternoon, there is only one ‘on-call’ GP and the time taken for a single home visit could be used to see up to 10 more patients at the surgery. If you request a home visit after 12:00 noon, it is likely that the duty doctor will phone to assess the urgency of the situation and decide whether the patient should be brought to the surgery where we have the necessary facilities to best deal with the problem.

Home visits are not a way for patients to resolve personal transportation problems. If you are able to get to the shops, or the hairdresser, or to hospital appointments, then you should come to the surgery for your routine appointments.

Home Visit Guidelines

If you require a home visit please expect that you will be required to give the receptionist some indication of the nature of the problem. This then allows the doctor to assess the urgency. Our receptionists will only add visit requests to a request list; the doctors will decide if your request for a visit is appropriate. If they decide that it is not appropriate for you to be visited at home, you will be notified by telephone and informed that you will need to attend the surgery to be seen.

GP visit recommended

Home visiting makes clinical sense and is the best way of giving a medical opinion in cases involving the terminally ill or the truly bed bound patient for whom travel by car would cause a significant deterioration in their medical condition.

GP visit may be useful

Following a conversation with a health professional, it may be agreed that a seriously ill patient will be helped by a GP’s visit.

GP visit is not appropriate

In most of the cases below a visit would not be an appropriate use of your GP’s time or best for the patient:

Heart Attack – severe crushing chest pain. In this case it is essential to get the patient to hospital as soon as possible and the correct approach is to call 999 for an ambulance.

Common symptoms of childhood: fevers, cold, cough, earache, headache, diarrhoea/vomiting and most cases of abdominal pain. These patients are usually readily transportable and able to travel to the surgery. It is also likely that they would be assessed and treated more rapidly and effectively by attending the surgery rather than waiting for a doctor to visit. Please note it is not harmful to take a child with fever outside.