Welcome to

Briarwood Medical Centre

At Briarwood Medical Centre the staff take pride in offering the highest standard of patient-centred healthcare. We offer a wide variety of medical services including the management of chronic diseases, antenatal and postnatal care, childhood vaccinations and well-person check-ups.  In addition to everything you need to know about the practice you will also find a wealth of health-related information in the menu on the right hand side.  Please have a look around and do send us some feedback if you like.

Accessing GP services

Briarwood Medical Centre is open and if you need to see a GP, please ring us on 01772 529230. We are open from 8.00am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday and 9.00am to 12noon on a Sunday.   You can also call NHS 111.  Appointments are being delivered face-to-face, online and over the telephone. If you are asked to come into the surgery for a face-to-face appointment, please remember to wear a face covering. Measures are in place to keep you safe from infection during your visit to the surgery.

Repeat prescriptions can be ordered by phoning us on 01772 529230; online via Patient Access, NHS or mygp apps. If you need an access code for any of the apps, we can email this to you.  

We are open and continue to provide services as we have done throughout the pandemic. This means that for patients, we are providing GP services, with face to face appointments available to those who need them. The threat of infection from COVID-19 still exists within our communities, and locally patients are being asked to continue to follow guidance in place and take the necessary precautions such as wearing face coverings and practicing good hygiene.   Our practice building is a public building and as such must be kept covid-secure. We have a process in place for managing entry into the premises to help minimise the risk of anybody spreading the virus. Please continue to follow this.

Not all conditions need to be seen by our GP's in a face-to-face appointment. When contacting us, you will undergo an assessment (called triaging) of your needs.  If safe and appropriate to do so the clinician may undertake your consultation via telephone or through a video consultation.  Lots of common conditions can be diagnosed using mobile devices, telephone or video thanks to the experience of the clinicians and their ability to recognise the signs and symptoms of conditions from the information you provide. However, if they judge that it is safer and more appropriate to organise a face-to-face appointment for you then this will be arranged. 

If for a number of reasons, you aren’t able to have an appointment via video technology then your clinician will arrange an alternative option – either a phone call, or a face-to-face appointment for you.  Your community pharmacy can support you with a wide range of minor ailments.

Message from Dr Methukunta, Senior Partner

You will have seen that the highest priority for the NHS is to offer booster COVID jabs to everyone over 18. This is a big challenge as it will require everyone to work even harder and longer than they do now. Winter has always seen a lot more illness and higher demand for services. COVID has made it even harder, and the new Booster campaign makes it impossible for us to maintain normal services. Our phone lines are overwhelmed by the volume of calls we receive, and we kindly ask you to only ring the surgery when it’s essential. That way we can respond to our patients with the highest need. If you have a vaccine query ring the national booking service, not the surgery.

To keep our patients safe and prevent our staff from catching COVID or having to self-isolate, we will be doing telephone (or digital) consultations first and then inviting those patients that we need to see face to face into the surgery. In view of the extremely infection nature of this new strain we will be rigorously applying control of infection measures within the practice and ask patients to comply with these requirements.

We will do our very best to meet our patients needs but there may be times in the extreme circumstances we are now in that we have to prioritise those in greatest need. Many minor illnesses are self-limiting and do not need a clinical intervention. Patients can often seek help for such conditions from the local pharmacy. Routine care where a patient’s condition is stable may need to be delayed for a while.

We will always do our best for our patients but ask for your understanding in these most challenging of circumstances.

Covid vaccination status requests

From 17 May 2021, people in England who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can demonstrate their vaccination status for international travel. A full course is currently two doses of any approved vaccine. Vaccine status will be available through the NHS COVID Pass service from: 

• the NHS App which you can download from app stores 

• the NHS website 

• 119 - by requesting a paper letter

You will need to register to use the online services, if you have not already. It may take more than a week for your identity to be checked and verified.

If you cannot access the online services, and you have had both doses of the vaccine, you can request a paper letter from the NHS by calling 119. Only call 119 if you are due to travel outside the UK in the near future and have had your second dose more than 5 working days ago. It may take up to 7 working days for the letter to arrive.

This practice is not able to provide you with a letter that shows your COVID-19 vaccination status. Please do not contact the practice about your COVID-19 vaccination status unless you have been advised to by the 119 service.

When you're planning your travel, you should check the latest information on demonstrating your COVID-19 status when travelling abroad on the gov.uk website. Make sure there is enough time to get proof of your COVID-19 vaccination status before you are due to travel.

Issues with our telephone lines

We are aware of the difficulties that some patients are experiencing in getting through to the surgery via telephone. This issue is affecting most practices across central Lancashire. We do apologise and are working hard to resolve this with the local IT/telephone supplier as soon as possible.  

This issue is particularly prominent during peak periods, for example in the mornings, when phone lines tend to be by far the busiest.  Ourselves and GP practices in the area are working with the supplier to migrate away from what was an old system to a new one and this work will conclude soon. This new system has additional capacity for practices when a high volume of calls are being experienced.  

We appreciate the frustration this may cause to you. You can continue to call the surgery at anytime but please bear with us, particularly during peak periods. Please continue to be respectful towards our staff on the other end of the phone line. Abuse of any kind will not be tolerated.

You can request repeat prescriptions online if already registered for online services or you can also call 111 for non-urgent NHS advice.     

If you’d like to make a complaint about this matter then you can do so by contacting the CCG. Please see the contact us section of this website here for more information on how to make a complaint.