We know that some patients struggle to understand spoken English because either they do not speak or understand the language or they have medical reasons for why they need additional communication support when attending appointments at the surgery. If you feel you need an interpreter, you can either attend with a friend or family member to help you translate, or we are happy to arrange an interpreter for you.
For communication support, please try to give the surgery as much notice as possible for your appointments as we need 10 days’ notice in order to organise this for routine appointments.
Please ensure that you do not cancel appointments using the text back service if an interpreter has been booked for you as it is important we are notified so that we can cancel the interpreter services. Please also ensure we have plenty of notice if you need to rearrange an appointment with interpreter support.
Also, if you need to change or rebook an appointment we will need more time to be able to rebook the interpreter. Once appointments have been booked please do make sure you attend them as they are very costly to the NHS and extra time is always allowed for you.