North East Family Medicine welcome new patients to apply.
There are times when we close our books to new patients due to the limited capacity of our doctors. Our priority is to ensure our patients can access medical care in a timely manner and we monitor our wait times closely.
All Patients who wish to join us at North East Family Medicine will require a new patient appointment.
This appointment is an opportunity to meet the team and allow us to start creating a medical file for you. The appointment is split into 2 parts, the first half of the appointment will be with one of our practice nurses and the second half of the appointment completed with one of our General Practitioners.
Services that can not be offered in the new patient consult:
WorkCover consultations
GP Mental Health Plan Creations
GP Management plans
Prescriptions for drugs of dependence
Procedures
Urgent or acute care
At the end of the consult, if it is mutually decided that you become a patient at the clinic, we can arrange to get your file transferred from your previous clinic.
Please note we are a private billing clinic and fees will need to be paid on the day of the consultation as we do not offer credit or repayment plans.
It must also be noted that we do not provide medical care to Residential Aged Care Facilities. If you think you may require this service now or in the immediate future, we can identify a suitable clinic to assist you.
Many of our doctors have established patient lists. In order to ensure their current patients are able to get in to see their doctor in a timely basis, we can not continue to add to certain doctor’s lists. We aim to keep our waiting lists to two weeks maximum for non urgent appointments.
We also need to maintain our doctors welfare and adding to an already full workload will lead to burnout and we want to make sure our doctors are able to care for their patients to the best of their ability.
Why can I not get an urgent appointment as a new patient?
We have a well thought out process for new patient appointments. We need to ensure that we have all the required information for each new patient before consultation for patient safety. Each new patient appointment is a long consultation with our nursing team and then a doctor and this can not be scheduled immediately into our busy diary.
All GP practices in the area are struggling with large workloads and a shortage of doctors. We can only accomodate a certain number of new patients at any one time.
