Expediting Policy

Hospital/Clinic Appointments

Once you have been referred by a doctor to the hospital, you will either be booked into an available slot by us or will join a queue to be booked in by the hospital/clinic. As a practice, we have no control over when you may be offered an appointment by the hospital/clinic as this is beyond our ability to control. If you have been referred to Burton or Derby hospitals, you can contact them to ask about the progress of your referral on these phone numbers.

Non-urgent advice: Queens Hospital Burton

Patient Access Line 01283 593200

Non-urgent advice: Royal Derby Hospital

Medical Outpatients Line 01332 785686

Expediting requests

If you feel like you need to be seen sooner, you may ask for your appointment to be expedited. We can provide you with a form to fill out with the details of your symptoms and symptom management while waiting for treatment. You will need to justify your reasoning for wanting an appointment sooner on this form as well.

Non-urgent advice: Please note:

We require that patients wait at least 3 month from the date of the referral before completing an expediting form. If you believe your symptoms are worsening before 3 months have elapsed, please submit a request to discuss this with a GP.

While you may request for your appointment to be expedited, we cannot guarantee the hospital/clinic will be able to bring your appointment forward. Once you have provided a completed expediting form to us, it can take up to 2 weeks for this to be transferred to the hospital. Please note that the hospital will not accept an expediting request directly from patients as it must be provided by the registered GP surgery.

Non-urgent advice: Please note:

You can only attempt to expedite your appointment once. If the request is not accepted or actioned by the hospital, we will not be able to send another request unless a doctor deems it necessary.