Today has been a crazy day with the change in the way we have to run the practice to keep our patients safe and with the escalation to pandemic alert level three.

Our team worked brilliantly under trying conditions with internet access lost and severe limitations on phone capacity due to the volume of calls. Despite this we managed to safely attend to every patient that arrived at the practice, issued over six times the number of scripts we do in the day and were continually on surgery landlines and personal mobile phones to deal with patient issues remotely.

It is important to emphasise that as an essential service the surgery and pharmacies remain operational regardless of the alert level. There is no need to panic and request scripts earlier than you normally would. We will be there to help deal with your issues when you need us.

We anticipate that tomorrow will run as smoothly as today but should be an improvement as the internet returned just before we closed at 6pm tonight. Spark is arranging additional phone lines for us and we will be exploring video consultation options. Tomorrow will also see the start of influenza vaccination clinics as advised in an earlier post today.