Dear Patient:
In our practice we strive to provide you with the best medical care in a friendly and stress-free setting. Our goal is to make your visit to our office pleasant and satisfactory to you in every respect.
We do not want you to wait to be seen. If you arrive in time for your appointment and are not taken into a examination room within 15 minutes, please let our receptionists know. If there is a delay due to an unavoidable medical emergency, we will let you know and give you the option to wait or to reschedule.
Health Maintenance Visits, Physicals and Annual Checkups: Please come in 30 minutes early if you are a new patients to fill out the 4 page Adult Health Data Base and 15 minutes early if you are an established patients to fill out the Health Update Form.
If you have a problem with our staff, or feel your health problem has not been adequately addressed, we will make every effort to correct this. Please ask to speak to our office administrator Pam Harding or to your doctor about it. This way you are helping us to improve our service to you.
To keep our practice open and viable we ask you to pay at time of service. If this is a hardship for you please ask to speak to Pam Harding. Please read our financial policy.
Medical Staff: Our office is staffed by 3 pediatricians, 5 internists and 1 physician assistants and 1 nurse practitioner. You are asked to choose a primary doctor but in an emergency, or when your primary doctor is out of the office, or when you need admission to the hospital, one of the other doctors may take over your care temporarily while you are in the hospital. After your discharge your primary doctor will resume your care. In our adult medicine department 3 of the 5 doctors — Drs. Albright, Meyer and Damasco — take turns for a week at a time caring for patients in the hospital in addition to seeing them in the office. The other 2 — Drs. Breder and Metsch — are primarily seeing office patients, although on weekends and after hours all 5 doctors take turns in a our call schedule, so that someone is always available (24/7) to talk to you on the telephone or see you in the office. Brattleboro Memorial Hospital employs night time hospitalists as a new service to the community. Therefore, if in an emergency you need to be admitted to the hospital during the night, the hospitalist will take care of you until the next morning, when one of our rounding physicians takes over your care.
When you need a prescription refill: You may ask for refill during a regularly scheduled office visit or use our medication renewal form or leave a message on our dedicated refill line 258-3905 ext 150. This is checked twice a day. A medical assistant transcribes your request, pulls your medical record and passes it on to the physician to authorize the refill. The receptionists are not equipped to take messages regarding refills and will refer you to the refill line. Although we will make every effort to fill it on the day that you called, we ask you to give us at least 24 hours on weekdays, longer on weekends, to fulfill your request. If your doctor is not available to review your request, one of the others may do so and authorize the refill. So, don't be alarmed if another doctor's name appears on your prescription bottle. Please note: prescriptions for narcotic pain medications are not refilled after hours or on weekends.
On some days we may receive up to 200 requests for prescription refills! Please try to obtain all your routine prescriptions at the same time each year, preferably during a check-up or health maintenance visit. This will make our service to you more efficient and free up our staff for other important tasks.
Mail order prescriptions: We can no longer mail in or fax prescriptions for you, as this is too time-consuming. Instead we will give you 90-day written prescriptions with 3 refills for you to mail in.
Narcotic prescriptions: These require 3 days' notice ahead of due date.
We do require that a patient be seen at least once a year in order to refill a prescription medication; to make sure that the medication has not affected liver or kidney function we also do blood testing at that time.
Please send us an email with any comments or observations you may have. Any help from you to make our practice better is greatly appreciated!
The Physicians of Brattleboro Primary Care
