Customer Care

Our practice is committed to delivering excellent patient service.  This customer care policy sets out what this commitment means in practice, what patients can expect from us and what we expect from our patients.

Our promise to you

We are committed to providing access to our services and offering choice whenever possible in the services we provide and the way we deliver them, Our Staff are responsible for providing an efficient, caring and professional service.

We will ensure that you are dealt with:

• Quickly
• Fairly
• In a courteous and helpful manner.

We will always:

• Ensure that staff take responsibility for resolving or dealing with your query, or that they refer to an appropriate colleague
• Give as much information as possible in answer to your query.

We would like you to:

• Give us the information we need to help you
• Treat all our staff fairly and with respect
• Speak to the staff with courtesy even when dissatisfied with the response or our services
• Give us your views and suggestions to help us to improve our services
• Keep any appointments that you have with us
• Tell us if you know any patients who need our help or feel that they have not been treated fairly.

Please note that we have a zero tolerance policy against verbal or physical aggressive behaviour towards our staff.

Our Customer Standards

Face to Face Contact

We will:

• Make sure that our premises are accessible
• Aim to welcome visitors within a maximum of five minutes of your arrival unless you use our automatic check in system)
• Respect your privacy, offering private areas for discussion if required
• Make sure that our staff identify themselves by wearing badges
• Listen to you and respond to your needs
• Be welcoming courteous and helpful at all times
• We will constantly update you on the waiting times if the clinics are running late.

Contact by telephone

We will:

• Aim to answer your calls as promptly as possible.
• Use answerphones as appropriate for certain services, but the messages will be as helpful and informative as possible.
• Attempt to resolve your query at the first point of contact. If this is not possible, we will pass your call to somebody who can help and ensure that you have the name of the staff member dealing with your enquiry.

Contact in writing

We will:

• Aim to respond to written complaints or enquires within five working days (one week) of receipt, resolving the issues raised if at all possible. If the issue is more complicated and likely to take longer to resolve, we will give you an idea of how long this will take.
• Ensure that within the response provided customers are given a named contact of the staff member dealing with the issue.
• Delivering an effective service to customers with different needs
• All our patients have the right to expect the same level of service.  The Practice should be careful not to make assumptions about people’s needs or abilities but should consult them to identify their needs.
• We will make every attempt to supply information in an appropriate format and will make sure that disabled people and people whose first language is not English can get access to interpreting, translation and communication support.

Making the Policy a success

This policy sets out Snodland Medical Practice’s commitment to its patients.  In order for us to learn and improve our services we want to use the feedback from the contact that we have to make changes.

We will do this by:

• Publicising our standards to our patients
• Carrying out patient surveys annually to measure the success of the policy
• Introduce internal monitoring to help our services meet the standards
• Support and train staff to provide better patient service
• Monitor our complaints to identify where we need to make improvements.

Customer Care Policy

If you feel that we have not met the standards set out in this policy you can speak or write to the Assistant Practice Manager with your feedback. All feedback received will be investigated and receive a full response.When the service does not meet your expectations please see the complaints policy below

Read our complaints procedure