We believe in working together with our patients. This works best when there is a mutual respect.
Sometimes life’s stresses can cause us all to be anxious and angry. We understand this, after all, we are all human.
When it takes a turn for the worse and turns into aggression or abuse towards our clinical or administrative staff we will in the first instance send a letter detailing what has taken place and requesting that such an event doesn’t happen again.
We understand that receiving such a letter can also be distressing and we would like to reassure our patients that these have a short life span on their record of 6 months and that it will only be if they require to be sent a second letter in this time that they are removed from the list.
The practice does have the right to remove violent patients from their list with immediate effect providing the police have been phoned. This is in order to safeguard Practice staff, patients and other persons. Violence in this context includes actual or threatened physical violence or verbal abuse which leads to fear for a person’s safety. In this situation we will phone the police and notify the patient in writing of their removal from the list and record in the patient’s medical records the fact of the removal and the circumstances leading to it.
Patients will also be removed from the list in the following circumstances:
- Violence and aggression towards staff or members of the public.
- Repeated coercive or manipulative behaviour.
- Threats or attempted bribery.
- Damage to practice property or equipment.
- Change of residence to outside of the practice area or dishonesty regarding place of residence.
- Persistent misuse of the system.
- Patients who the doctors are unable to manage clinically e.g. breach of contract with doctor regarding use of prescribed medicine, break down in patient communication or breakdown in trust.
Patients who are disruptive and display aggressive and/or intimidating behaviour and refuse to leave the premises, staff are instructed to dial 999 for Police assistance, charges may then be brought against these individuals.
