Practice Charter
Patient Responsibilities
As a patient some of your key rights are to:
- To receive NHS services free of charge
- Not be discriminated against
- Be treated with professional standards by qualified and experienced staff
- Expect NHS organisations to monitor and try to improve continuously the quality of their services
- Be treated with dignity and respect
- Accept or refuse treatment and only be physically examined with consent
- Be given information about any test and treatment options open to you, what they involve and their risks and benefits
- Have access to your own records
- Privacy and confidentiality
- Have any complaint acknowledged within three days and properly investigated
- Compensation if harmed by negligent treatment
Some of our key pledges to patients are to:
- Ensure that any transfer between services is as smooth as possible and you are fully involved
- Provide a clean and safe environment
- Share with you any letters sent between clinicians about you
- Treat you with courtesy and give support in the handling of any complaint and ensure it has no effect on any future treatment
- Identify, acknowledge and learn from mistakes, complaints and claims
Some of your responsibilities are to:
- Treat NHS staff and other patients with respect
- Keep appointments or cancel within a reasonable time
- Give positive or negative feedback about your experiences and the treatment and care you receive
Please respect our staff
All of the staff at Millgate Healthcaree empathise and understand how frustrating it can be accessing clinical services within the NHS at this current time. We are all patients within the NHS too and are facing the same challenges due to the unprecedented increase in demand on all NHS services.
Our staff members are facing daily abuse from our patients; this can range from unreasonable demands, general rudeness, shouting, and swearing to personal attacks and threats of violence. These behaviours will not be tolerated.
We understand that anxieties around health and wellbeing can lead to heightened emotions; we recognise that our patients are understandably and reasonably worried about their own health or that of a loved one. In these instances we, of course, understand patients can get frustrated or upset. However, there are no circumstances in which our staff should face shouting, swearing or feeling threatened within their place at work.
Our staff work hard, often in difficult circumstances, to maintain the running of our services.
All of our staff care deeply about providing each and every patient they come into contact with a high level of care and a positive outcome to whatever their enquiry may be.
Please do not forget that the receptionist you are speaking to on the telephone, the nurse/healthcare person/phlebotomist you are being seen by in a clinic or the GP with who you are being treated by is a fellow human being. Please treat our staff with the dignity and respect they deserve.
We operate zero tolerance to abuse, if patients abuse our staff they will receive a warning letter which may result in the patient having to register elsewhere.
