EMISAccess is a new secure facility for the booking of online appointments. As well as making online appointments, it has additional facilities for making changes to your personal details e.g. email address or telephone number, online ordering of repeat prescriptions and a secure messaging service. The following guidance gives further information and outlines our terms and conditions. If you are interested in applying for EMISAccess please complete the form at the end of this leaflet.

Appointments

The facility can be used to book appointments for the minor illness clinic, doctors and nurses appointments. When booking an online appointment there is the option to enter a reason for your appointment. We would encourage you to enter a reason so it gives us the opportunity to ensure that your appointment is with the professional most appropriate to help you. Please be assured that all details entered are secure. Furthermore our practice has a strict confidentiality policy.

Minor Illness Clinic

These are run by specialist nurses to manage certain conditions in patients over 2 years old. The conditions that can be seen in this clinic include

§ Cough, Colds, Flu

§ Sore Throats

§ Eye or Ear problems

§ Sinusitis

§ Hay fever

§ Skin Problems & Rashes

§ Cystitis

§ Thrush

§ Diarrhoea or Vomiting

We would recommend that if you are making an appointment for any of these reasons then to make it with the minor illness clinic.

Healthcare Assistant Appointments

Healthcare Assistant appointments may be booked online for blood pressure checks.

Nurse Appointments

Nurse appointments in the General Nursing Clinic can be made for conditions such as:

§ Removal of stitches

§ Dressing Changes

§ Annual hypertension checks

§ Injections

§ Travel Advice and immunisations

The nursing team offer other services such as family planning, cervical smears, epilepsy reviews and ECGs. Appointments for these conditions are not current available to book online. This is because only certain nurses have the training to deal with these conditions. If you require one of these appointments then please contact the surgery by telephone. If you did inadvertently book an appointment for one of these conditions then you will be asked to rebook and this will cause unnecessary inconvenience to you.

Doctors Appointments

Doctor appointments are usually booked for

· Suspected illness (unless it is a condition dealt within the minor illness clinic)

· Illness (unless it is a condition dealt within the minor illness clinic)

· Follow-up to previous consultations

· Medication Reviews (Unless you are seen in one of our special chronic disease management clinics)

Please ensure that you book the appointments appropriately. If you are unsure as to whether it is appropriate for you to see a nurse or a doctor please contact us by telephone.

Missed Appointments

We would ask that if you will be unable to attend an appointment that you either contact us by telephone to cancel it or cancel it online. This will allow us to offer the appointment to another patient.

We recognise that there are valid reasons sometimes for missing an appointment. We will be monitoring such occurrences on a regular basis. If you miss an appointment more than 3 times in one year we may remove your facility to use EMISAccess, however, you will still be able to book appointments with our receptionists.

Repeat Prescriptions

Your repeat prescriptions may be ordered online. When ordering repeat prescriptions please identify in the “Message” box where you would like to collect the prescription from. The options are:

· South Street Surgery

· Bishop’s Park health Centre

· Trinity Chemist

· Williamsons Chemist

· Boots (Bishop’s Stortford)

· Tesco (Bishop’s Park)

· Lloyds in Bishop’s Stortford Town Centre

· Lloyds in Thorley

Secure Messaging

The online facility has the option to send secure messages to the surgery. Such message will be automatically entered into your medical records as are the replies from the surgery. Please note that this facility should under no circumstances be used for emergency or urgent messages.

Inappropriate use

We will be monitoring the use of this service and we are sure that you will find it useful. If, however, we find that any users are abusing the service, we will revoke access to the service and you will have to liaise with our reception team for services.

Examples we would consider as inappropriate include:

· Sending inappropriate or abusive messages

· booking appointments and not using them

· booking appointments for other family members using your name

· consistently booking inappropriate appointments with the doctors

Termination of Service

We reserve the right to terminate this service (or part of the service) without notice.

Changes to Service

Any changes to this service or to the terms and conditions will be posted on our website.

Interested in applying for the Service?

You can use the form below to request access to the service. You can only apply for yourself and not other members of your family except for children under 13yrs of age. For security reasons you will be asked to bring this application form to the surgery together with your passport or photo driving licence to confirm your identity.

To request the service for children under 13 we would require a parent with parental responsibility to attend the surgery. Before we can issue online passwords for children we would require the following identification

(i) Passport or Photo Driving Licence of Parent and

(ii) Birth Certificate of child(ren) for whom online appointments are being requested.

We recognise that some patients do not have these proofs of identities and we very much regret that without them, we are not able to allow online access. The online access is a service which directly links to your medical record at the surgery, through a secure webserver. In order to ensure confidentiality of your medical records we have to make sure that the person to which we issue the access code is you. So we can be certain of this, we require you to present with photo identity before you can be issued with an online access details. We can be sure that a passport or photo driving licence has been through a rigorous procedure before being issued and so we can be more confident about their genuineness than other forms of photo identity. This is why we only accept these two forms of photo identity for online access and we sincerely believe that this is in the best interest of you, the patient.

For children aged 13-16yrs we would request that both a parent/guardian and child attend to register the child. Children of this age may hold their own password if they have capacity/are able to understand the responsibility involved. However if the child prefers or does not have the capacity to understand the responsibility the parent can hold the password. The child may then attend the surgery at any point until they are 16 years old and request the password responsibility is changed to them. Their capacity to understand will be assessed at this time.

On-line access for children under 13 will be frozen on their 13th birthday until parent and child attend the surgery.