Educational Closures - Protected Time for Learning
Once a month (with the exception of August and December) the Rycote Practice closes between 13:00 and 18:00 to allow for essential staff training and development. This Protected Time for Learning (PTL) allows all our staff protected time to be released for educational sessions such as basic life support, clinical management updates, development of new services, customer care and mandatory training.
During this time an urgent service is provided by Buckinghamshire Urgent Care, the same organisation that provides Out of Hours cover when the surgery is closed at night and at weekends. If you call the surgery during a PTL afternoon you will receive a recorded message giving you the telephone number of the Out of Hours service.
We apologise for any inconvenience that this causes for patients but we hope that you understand that this is the most efficient and cost effective way of ensuring that our staff receive all the necessary training that they require. A full list of the upcoming dates for 2016/17 is listed below.
Upcoming PTL dates for 2019
Wednesday 13th February 2019 |
Tuesday 12th March 2019 |
Tuesday 30th April 2019 |
Wednesday 22nd May 2019 |
Wednesday 19th June 2019 |
Tuesday 9th July 2019 |
August 2019 - No closure |
Wednesday 18th September 2019 |
Tuesday 15th October 2019 |
Thursday 21st November |
December 2019 - No Closure |
Maintaining Good Access for Patients
We work very hard to ensure that we maintain excellent access for patients despite these closures. We provide additional urgent appointments on the morning of a closure and on the morning after a closure to ensure that patients can be seen on the day or within 24 hours of a closure. In addition, all of our GP partners who miss a surgery as a result of a closure put in an additional surgery on another day to ensure that there is no loss of appointments to patients.
Patients who are registered for online access can still book appointments and order repeat prescriptions when we are closed. If you have nominated a preferred pharmacy your prescription will also be available to collect direct from the pharmacy when we are closed. Visit our online access section of this page if you would like to know more.