A village medical practice is to change its patient booking method in an effort to improve care and reduce the time patients spend trying to get through on the phone.

The Bearsted surgery, near Maidstone, said it has been receiving on average 579 calls every day.

This has led to to long queues for “frustrated” patients and pressure on its reception team who have little time to triage patient calls effectively.

So from Monday (June 26), the practice will be trialling the use of an online booking system called Accurx, accessed through the surgery’s website or through the NHS app.

Patients will be asked to fill in a form explaining their problems in detail and the form will go to a GP at the practice who will triage the request appropriately, either by an on-the-day appointment, by a routine appointment in the future or by signposting the patient to other services.

More information about the Accurx system can be found here.

Appointments coud be with a GP, nurse, paramedic, pharmacist, physiotherapist or mental health practitioner as appropriate.

Those unable to access an online form will still be able to call the surgery, where the reception staff will complete the form for them. Ringing the surgery will not be a way around entering the system.

Patients can also drop in at the surgery and use a computer there to fill out the form.

The system will accept requests between 8am-12noon every working day. It will not function over weekends or bank holidays.

There will be no walk-in surgery.

The practice said that it was seeing 50% more patients every week than four years ago in 2019.

It was receiving between 120 to 300 requests for appointments daily.

The British Medical Association says that the maximum safe number of appointments a day for a GP is 25.

Bearsted has nine GPs and 15,000 patients on its lists, but Dr Andrew Mortimer, one of the partners, said the list was “going up and up every year.”

Dr Mortimer has been an NHS doctor for 29 years, and a GP in Bearsted for the last 19 years.

He said: “The situation across general practice, both locally and nationally, is not good. It’s causing a lot of frustration among our patents and patients throughout the country.

“We are sorry for the frustraion this is causing and we really do want to try to improve things.”

“The gap between supply and demand has got wider every year since I’ve been in general practice and it’s got to the point now where there’s a lot of frustration.

“It’s not working and things need to change.”

Dr Mortimer described the surgery as “very lucky.”

He said: “Some surgeries have fewer than half our number of GPs for so many patients.”

Dr Mortimer described the surgery‘s current telephone triage system as “not prefect”.

He said: ”We don’t always get a lot of information about the problem.”

The new system has been described as “a simple online form you can fill out at home and send back to us”.

Dor Mortimer explained: “It should enable us to deal with more demands, more safely and more effiiciently and with a lot less waiting on the telephone.

“We do listen to patients’ thoughts, their concerns. We do really care. We want to provide patients with the safest best and most efficient service that we can.”