New Appointment System

The information on the page below is to outline the challenges in the appointment system coming into effect from the 1st October 2025. These changes have been made due to a mandate from NHS England and the Department of Health.

Urgent Appointments

Urgent, same-day GP appointments and all treatment room appointments will continue to be booked in the usual way.

Routine Appointments

For all routine appointments, an e-consult will need to be completed. The link for this is below and can be found on our homepage. Once an e-consult has been submitted, it will be reviewed by one of our health navigators and if required a GP.

https://www.thefamilypracticewesterncollege.nhs.uk/online-services

After this, there are a number of different outcomes that are possible. You may be sent a booking link via the NHS app or by text message. This will allow you to book a specific appointment with a clinician. This could be a face-to-face or telephone appointment and may be with a GP, pharmacist, physiotherapist or other suitable clinician. Where appropriate your problem may be resolved by text message or phone call with the triaging GP.

If no appointment is immediately available via the booking link please check back using the link the following day at 10am when more appointments will be released.

Depending on your problem a message may also come through to you advising a more appropriate means of accessing healthcare. This may include visiting a community pharmacy, calling 111, or attending a walk-in centre. If you have any problems completing an e-consult, you can call reception and our team will complete the e-consult for you over the phone.

It is not possible for our reception team to book a routine appointment for you without an e-consult being completed. Please do not attend the practice to book an appointment as an econsult will still need to be completed. This is to ensure the system is as equitable as possible for all patients.

We appreciate this change may be unsettling for some who are used to booking an appointment in a more traditional way. But we believe by making these changes, we can accommodate the mandate from NHS England and the Department of Health and continue to deliver high quality healthcare to all our patients.

As this is a new system it may be necessary on occasion to reduce access to routine appointments to ensure we continue to provide safe patient care. If unavailable please try again the following day.

Easy Read Version

An easy to read version of this information is available here.

Published: Sep 22, 2025