Home visits / house calls

We believe that it is important to examine patients under ideal clinical conditions with all the necessary equipment and facilities to hand. Therefore we do not usually visit patients with acute illnesses at home, but ask you to come to the surgery whenever this is possible. We make special arrangements to see acutely ill patients in the surgery quickly with the minimum of waiting. Our Doctors typically see four patients at the Practice in the time it takes to do a single home visit.  For this reason, we ask our patients to come to the Practice if at all possible. However, we can visit you at home if your condition means you are housebound or terminally ill.

If you need to request a home visit please try to do so by telephone before 10.30am.

It is helpful to give the Receptionist an idea of the problem to enable her to alert the Doctor to the urgency of your call.  Please be prepared to tell the Receptionist about your condition so we can visit the most urgent cases first. The Doctor (or triage nurse) may wish to speak with you to see if it would be better for you to come to the surgery to be seen immediately.  

Home visits are normally made between 12 noon and 2pm.  Unfortunately, we are unable to arrange a specific time for a visit.  It may be decided that it is more appropriate for a district nurse to visit a patient (eg dressing of wounds, etc).  Please note that demands for a home visit are not the "right" of a patient, but are made at the discretion of the Doctor, based on clinical need only.

Please try to request a visit before 10.30am. Although visits are normally made by the patient's 'usual Doctor', there is no guarantee that a visit will be carried out by a particular Doctor. This will depend on Doctor availability at the requested times, if the visit request is short notice or when there are many visits to be made to other patients on that day. However, we certainly appreciate that you may be housebound by illness or too frail to get to the surgery and under such circumstances we will always be happy to visit you at home.

For home visit requests please telephone 01480 483100

Please only book a home visit if you cannot get to the surgery.  If at all possible, please try to get to us - we can see you as an emergency on the same day if appropriate.