The Practice will close on the following afternoons from 1.00 p.m. These closures are set by Kent & Medway Integrated Care Board (KMICB) and are to ensure that Primary Health Care Teams are getting the essential training and development needed to ensure delivery of the best possible service to patients.

When the surgery is closed there will be an On Call service running during these events and these dates will also be displayed in the surgery premises and on the surgery door. If you have an urgent need for medical attention please call 111. In an emergency continue to call 999. Please remember to collect your repeat prescriptions outsides of these times.

2023 closures:                                                       2024 closures:

• 10th May                                                        Thursday 1st February
• 8th June                                                         Wednesday 6th March
• 18th July
• 16th August
• 7th September
• 17th October
• 8th November

Our new telephone system has meant we no longer need separate telephone lines for appointments or dispensary. All calls can now go through the main telephone number - 01732 883161. From 1st February 2023 we will retire any other telephone numbers and only be using the main one. 

Borough Green Medical Practice has welcomed Ryan Martin as our new Clinical Pharmacist. He graduated from Reading University with an MPharm degree which he followed with Masters-level Independent Prescribing. Ryan has worked in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and been a Clinical Pharmacist in primary care since 2016, working in Medway and Maidstone prior to joining us.

As a Clinical Pharmacist, Ryan deals with medication queries and many types of general medication reviews amongst other things. His special interest areas are in lipid management (including statins) and treatments for osteoporosis. He will be contacting patients he can help, and appointments with him can also be booked. 

We want to be able to contact you on the right numbers for appointment invitations, forms and other communications. If you have changed your mobile phone number recently please email us to update our records at gp.g82120@nhs.net.

If we only have one number for more than one adult in your household – please provide us with one for each person.

With the flu vaccination and Covid Booster seasons approaching please CHECK and UPDATE the contact details we have for you!

Thank you in advance!

As you know, during the Covid pandemic, it was necessary for GP practices to change the way they worked to ensure that everyone was kept safe. Despite what the press may say, this did not mean that GPs stopped seeing patients face to face.  Here at Borough Green surgery we have always been proud that patients had good access to appointments and we were keen to ensure that this continued under the new way of working. Although we conducted initial triage on the telephone or online, we always invited patients in for a face to face appointment, if it was clinically appropriate. Of course, there are some conditions that have to be seen to be properly diagnosed and treated.  We continued to see as many as 40 patients a day and dealt with hundreds more on the telephone.

Some months ago, as the height of the pandemic passed, we reintroduced a small number of pre-bookable face to face appointments. At this stage, we were dealing with an avalanche of patient demand as people were contacting us with all the problems they had saved up during the pandemic. As you may know our phone lines were incredibly busy and as you may not know, our doctors were (and still often are) working 12/13 hour days to keep up with the demand. For this reason, we retained the initial telephone triage system for the majority of appointments. We will continue to retain this system for the time being as we believe it is the best option for ensuring that those patients we see face to face are those most appropriate to be seen, therefore providing the most efficient way of dealing with the continued high demand. If you have a strong preference to be seen you can discuss it with the GP during the call.

In addition to the pre-bookable appointments our doctors have 36 telephone appointments available for each available doctor on each day and patients who have a legitimately urgent need will still have the opportunity to speak to a doctor (may not be their own doctor) on the same day even when all these appointments are filled.

Our reception staff are trained to help patients to identify the most relevant care. We instruct them to ask patients why they are calling so that they can assist in ensuring the problem is dealt with by the most appropriate professional and that the professional can determine which calls might warrant a speedier response. If all our routine appointments are booked on the day you call you will be offered the next available routine appointment. If you  feel you are unable to wait, you can request an urgent appointment. We do ask patients not to take an urgent appointment slot unless they feel it is something so urgent that you would otherwise have to call 111 or attend A&E.

Many thanks,
Borough Green doctors