As the chairman of the Caradoc Patient Participation Group (PPG), I have had a lot of contact with both the management of the Ranworth Practice, who are taking caradoc over from Anglian Community Enterprise (ACE), and the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) who ordered the change.

Consequently, I thought I would try to clarify both the current situation and the way Caradoc is likely to operate in the future.

As you can imagine it is bound to take some time for matters to settle down because of all the changes needed.

However, Ranworth will take over on September 1 and Caradoc patients will continue go use the current surgery in Station Approach.

It is intended that there will be no ‘hub’, no ‘care navigation’ and no care navigators.

The system will be that if we phone in between 8am and 10am, we will be asked for our details and confirmation of the last three digits of our phone number.

It will be important to ensure the surgery has our number, preferably mobile for SMS messaging.

We will then be telephoned back by a GP who will decide on what kind of appointment is appropriate.

They will only try one ‘call back’, so it will be important to keep the phone close by.

As there will probably only be four phone lines we could still get the engaged signal, but each call into the surgery, should only take about 20 seconds.

So, hopefully, the wait should be short.

As I have said, at the moment staffing, equipment and BT lines will need a great deal of organising so we will all need to be patient patients and give the new management a chance given the, very, short timescale involved.

I will be keeping Caradoc PPG members up to date.

Neil Churcher

Chairman, Caradoc PPG