Clinical Capacity throughout July and August

St James Medical Centre will be operating with limited clinical capacity throughout July and August due to a lack of GPs.

As you may notice, on our “meet the team” page, we now have 4 GP vacancies. Unfortunately Dr Parkin has decided not to return after their maternity leave, Dr Baker will be going on Maternity and Dr Hearne is relocating.

As always we will endeavour to still provide the best care possible but we will be limiting our online medical requests each day, this is to ensure we can manage our capacity each day and have sufficient locum cover, where we have space we will look to increase the limit on the online services but this will be done on a day to day basis.

This does also mean, we are likely to have to operate on a urgent only basis on some days but we will provide you with sign posting where cases are not urgent, this may be 111, pharmacies or other suitable community services.

This is a necessary step to ensure clinical safety and protect those remaining GP’s from burnout, this is because, if burnout did occur, it would ultimately reduce capacity even further and even put us at risk of collapse.

It is not all doom and gloom though, we are continuing to look at other ways of managing our demand better and what care work can be distributed to other specialist roles.

We are going to be taking advantage of more self booking and automated features which should help you get you what you need quickly whilst reducing overhead on our teams.

We recognise that we have had problems with demand and capacity for a year now. Progress is being made but unfortunately with three more GPs departing, it will take a bit of time to recover fully.