In 25% of cases, your symptoms can be treated without needing to book an appointment with your GP. In order to save your time and enable GPs to see patients more quickly, please try the ‘3 Before GP’ steps:

• 1. Can you sort it yourself? – e.g. if you have a cold you should rest, keep warm, drink plenty of fluids and take cold medicines. A GP can’t cure a cold
• 2. If you would like advice, then please look at our website’s Treatment Room or go onto the NHS website, which provides advice written by doctors and nurses
• 3. If you would like more advice or have a question about online advice from the NHS website, please visit your visit your local pharmacist.

We don’t want to stop patients from seeing their GP if they need to, but if everyone followed the ‘3 Before GP’ steps – 50,000 appointments a year could be released to people who cannot treat themselves and need to see the GP.