A) What is happening in New Zealand

As the daily number of COVID cases is rising, we are moving to living with COVID in the community.

From 16 February, all positive cases will be required to isolate for ten days from the date of their positive test, and all close contacts will be required to isolate for seven days from their contact with a positive case

Rapid antigen testing (RAT) will become more readily available to allow critical workers to return to work if they remain well. We will provide an update on how to access RAT tests when we have the information available.

B) Changes to how we offer our services at Cambridge Family Health

With more cases in the community and less stringent contact tracing, as a practice, we need to protect our patients and staff as much as possible to reduce the risk of having too many staff members contracting COVID at any one time and then having to stand down from work. This will allow us to continue serving our patient community to the best of our ability. By limiting the number of patients entering our building we will also reduce the risk of patients infecting each other in our waiting room area.

Our practice will operate in the following way:

1) You will be offered phone or video consultations initially and you will be invited into the practice for a face-to-face consultation only if deemed necessary following the initial virtual consultation.

2) You will be directed by the GP or nurse to park in our car park at an agreed time and remain in your car. The GP or nurse will then phone you on your mobile to come into the building, where the GP or nurse will check your temperature on entry before your face-to-face consultation.

3) If you require a face-to-face consultation following an initial phone consultation, you will be charged for one consultation only.

4) Phone and video consultations will incur our standard consultation fees.

5) Repeat prescriptions will be sent to a pharmacy and charged at the normal pick up prescription fee, unless the prescription is to be sent out of Cambridge.

6) Childhood immunisations and urgent cervical smears will still be undertaken

7) We have been informed by VTNZ that there is an extension in place for driver’s licence renewals until 31 May 2022. Therefore driver’s licence medicals will be postponed for 6 weeks from 15/2/22.

8) If you phone us and report respiratory symptoms and wish to be seen by a GP, you will be allocated to the GP seeing respiratory patients on the day. Patients will be asked to drive around to the back of our building and park in the carparks by the side of our building. The respiratory doctor will generally see patients in their cars and bring you into our building for examination in our designated respiratory room, as needed.

9) Covid testing is continuing via booked appointment only, please follow the instructions you will be given when you book. Please remain in your car at all times and drive into our main car park and turn right as per our sign on the fence, this will take you to the back of our building where testing will take place in your car. Please wind down the windows in your car when you attend.

10) Covid test results: you will be texted your result when we get it, test results can take up to 3 days to return from the laboratory and we are checking results seven days a week. Our phone lines continue to be very busy and we therefore kindly ask that you do not phone us for your results.

For more information on phase 2 of the Omicron response go to: https://www.health.govt.nz/cov...