Lakeside Stamford suspends Doctrin online service

Lakeside Healthcare has suspended its online Doctrin service in Stamford because it has been overwhelmed.

The service, introduced last year to ease pressure on the GP practice’s telephone lines and receptionists, has been offline since Tuesday afternoon (August 1).

A notice about ‘capacity issues’ and the suspension was placed on the surgery website and on its social media.

It did not indicate whether the problem was more patients using the online platform or fewer members of staff being able to respond.

Today (Friday, August 4) GP partner Dr Gavin Cattigan said: “Doctrin is an increasingly popular way of patients submitting non-urgent cases to us and our team is working hard to ensure a speedy response.

“However, as we are increasing other ways of dealing with patients, including additional face-to-face appointments and telephone consultations, we are constantly reviewing our workload against our clinical capacity, particularly during the summer which is a hot spot for annual leave requests.

“This means that we have taken the decision to temporarily close for new cases to ensure that we have capacity to deal with cases already in the system in a timely manner, alongside the other appointments and services we are offering.

“Since introducing Doctrin in March last year we have delivered over 30,000 consultations to patients and an average of 73 new cases are submitted each day, which is increasing all the time, with the oldest user being 95 years of age.

“The average case is closed within six hours from submission, three quarters of users would recommend it and 88.3 per cent say they are treated with compassion.

“We are working to reopen Doctrin for new cases as soon as possible and apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.”

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