doctors making it as awkward as possible to be seen

MrsAudus2b

I recently had a stomach pains that were very unusual - rang NHS direct and they told me to take painkillers. However, within an hour the pain was much worse. Phoned surgery at 1.30pm, my own doctor phoned back at 2.30pm and told me to go in at 5pm. He then sent me straight to hospital - where I ended up having an emergency operation to remove my appendix.

I was extremely impressed and grateful to the doctor for seeing me so soon and acting so quickly. The surgery is in general often like this - emergency appointments available the same day, appointments can be made on the day and can also be made in advance if required. They also now open until 6.30pm and plan to trial saturday opening soon.

Where I used to work, a lad was complaining of the same pains. He phoned his doctor - told to come back in 3 days. Ended up having an ambulance and was later told his appendix was ready to burst - very dangerous.

I'm planning on staying with my surgery for as long as possible!
x

blue_monkey_2

jackieb wrote: »

A few years ago one of our receptionists was fired for telling a patient's details to one of her friends. It came about that the patient hadn't told anyone she was pregnant, including her partner, yet it still got out, via the receptionist.

Not just me then. My sister came home and said 'Congratuations'. I had not even told my mother and had called hubby on the phone - I'd been to the docs earliuer that day to book in to speak to the midwife. No-one outside that room knew. I had not even told my mother and the rest of the village knew I was pregant.

Apparently one of the receptions was 'overheard' talking about me so they must have been going through the notes.

I was fuming and really regret not taking it further as it is bloody disgraceful!!

lostinrates

We have the phone back system, and in many cases its useful, I have almost all my actual appointments over the phone and pick up any prescriptions I need from reception.

in some its a waste of time and resources.

For example, this weekend I found a lump in my DH . He works away from here during the week and needed to be seen ASAP if he needed a referal because he can't make a mid week appointement, but could delay going in on Monday am.

Having battled the 8;30 emgaged rush, he told the receptionist what it was, i.e. that a phone call wouldn't do, he needed feeling! but the doctors manage their own diaries and the receptionist cannot access them. He was very clear about the situation, but many people, particularly men, are embarrassed to do that. As it happened, DH was flexible about which GP he saw, and the receptionist asked a different less busy GP to put him to the front of the list. This is fine for DH but, as I say, someone more bashful might have given up and put it o the back of their mind.

blue_monkey_2

Oh, and being fobbed off for 6 months with 'a pelvic infection'. Actually it turned out that I was actually suffing with ovarian cysts, one of which reached 10cms in the end and resulted in me losing an ovary as it has twisted it. I lost my job as I was off work for so long too. I was even offered a hysterectomy to 'sort the problems' out when the cysts would still have grown as they were on my ovaries. I did my own research to sort the problem and chose my own pill to stop ovualtion and stop the cysts from growing. You have to wonder.


In the end I paid (and got into debt for) going to a private hospital to see a consultant. Who then jumped me to the top of his NHS list for an op. Money talks and all that!!

Oh god, and don't even get me started on the clinic for the appointment I apparently have for 23rd of March despite not having anything to say I have, nor will the clinic call me back. It is for my son's autitm as we moved and one doc signed us off after decided we were too far away for us to travel to him (who's choice??) and now he has now paediatrician.

Don't forget though, sing along with me 'thiiiiiiiiings.... can only get better, can only get better.....'

worried_jim

I have been told that this has been done for politcal reasons- the government can say that everyone gets a same day appointments- great if you are unemployed and have all day to waste but if you are working it makes it very awkward.
I recently popped in the surgery on the way home from work and asked for an appointment the next morning to be told that I had to call up that day, so I responded that as I am hear now why not just give me an appointment for tomorrow- this did not go down well with the receptionist. I explained that imagine if I was a plumber and you had a leaky pipe and called me to get it fixed and I told you that you have to call the next day- I would soon go out of business. Humourless. Anyway my eye infection got worse until one of the matriarchal ladies that I work with called the surgery demanded an appointment on my behalf for the next day- in fact a Dr called me back within half an hour to discuss the symptoms over the phone- what a palaver all for some eye drops.

blue_monkey_2

Yes, it is down to stats for the politicians, patients have to bee seen within a set time so this is why some doctors do not take advance appointments - because then you are seen as having to wait, so they do it on the same day only and once they are gone they are gone, and you can't have an appointment for tomorrow as you'll have to call again the next day.

KellyWelly

Our dr does this sort of thing. You can only book on the day and you have to phone at 8am to get a morning appointment and at 12pm for an afternoon appointment. You can't see your own dr unless by luck of the draw you get allocated an appointment with him/her. You can't book anything in advance even if the dr says 'come and see me again in x amount of time', you just have to remember to phone on the day and hope you get through in time. It is better in one way because I can remember years ago people would phone up with some infection or other illness and be told 'oh we can't see you for two weeks' by which time it would be really serious or you'd have suffered through it anyway. But a great number of times I have been unable to get an appointment for me or my children and tbh I've seen the out of hours emergency GP more than any of the GPs at our practice since they brought it in because we couldn't get an appointment in time with them and not for insignifiant things either.

Silverbird

Having worked previously for many years as a Receptionist and later a Secretary at a busy GP Practice, I can offer another view on things.

Unfortunately we obviously cannot magic up appointments and it's a shame that so many patients seemed to think we could or that we were 'hiding' them from them. However, there are always, always emergency appointments every day and we always used these for patients that told us their problem was an emergency and also for children and the elderly.

We would have given anything to get every single patient in to the doctor when they wanted to be. It would certainly have made our lives much easier! I always felt a sense of relief and happiness when I managed to get a patient in when they wanted.

We used to get told off by the doctors if a patient they didn't particularly like was booked in or if we'd used one of their very few (3) emergency slots for that clinic session.

We couldn't win!

We also had about 8 appointment slots per doctor per day (4 at the end of the morning and afternoon clinics) for each doctor that were blocked out and these appointments would only become available nearer the time, in order that the clinics were not just booked up with routine pre-booked appointments because obviously people will have problems that come on quickly and need seeing quickly, but not necessarily an emergency. This was a very helpful tool, but these appointments did get used up incredibly quickly, both at the start of the day and after we put the phones back on after lunch. There was nothing we could do about it though, as the doctors simply wouldn't budge and wouldn't extend their clinics or provide more of these 'released' appointments. We were very careful with these particular appointments and tried not to get them booked up with routine problems, because this was not their purpose (we treated the slots as 'semi-emergencies').

On another note with regards to the asthma inhalers - this started doing this just before I left my job at the Practice quite a few years ago and we were advised by the doctors that there were increasing numbers of patients abusing the inhalers and not following the instructions as to how much they were allowed. This was particularly with elderly patients. Apparently it's very harmful to take more than the recommended dose. So they felt that limiting one inhaler per month would help with this in that the patient would attend a doctor or nurse if they felt they required more and if they did require more then it would mean their asthma had likely gotten worse and they needed investigating. I hope this explains it a bit. Please do check to see if your surgery operate 'post back' prescriptions. This was what we did - you post in the prescription by post (or by hand) with an SAE and when the prescription has been signed it's posted back to you, meaning you only have to get to a chemist rather than trek back and forth to the docs.

Oh, and I'm disgusted at some of these receptionists talking about patients! It's no wonder GP receptionists have such a bad name. They should be ashamed and instantly dismissed. There's absolutely no excuse to discuss any patient's situation in earshot of anybody other than staff. There are always rooms that can be entered if the situation needs to be discussed (ie. receptionist advising a doctor what a patient has called to say or a doctor discussing a patient with a receptionist and asking her to do something). We never spoke a patient's name out at Reception. We would always ask the patient their name when they called up and never repeat it. If it was a difficult name we would ask them to spell it and never repeat it back. This was also the same with date of births and addresses. If we ever did repeat the address, we just read out the road and not the number. If we needed to speak to a colleague about a patient in earshot of patients, then we would hold up the notes so the colleague could read the name (and, of course, notes were never left where patients could see them). Really shocked at the behaviour of some of the receptionists mentioned above.

To the OP - are you absolutely positive that you have to turn up on the doorstep to get an appointment? This does seem extremely bizarre to me and if it's true then it certainly won't last long. Surely this will lead to a neglect in the health of elderly patients and those that work and those with small children? I would definitely write a letter to the Practice Manager to complain and possibly to your local PCT too.

~Chameleon~

MrsTine wrote: »

I have to say that to see a doctor at my surgery it's great - you can make a normal appointment for when your doc is next free OR another doctor is free if you're happy to see any GP. OR you can call first thing (or infact any time that day) and a nurse will call you back and basically triage you. They have one GP allocated every day to basically be the "emergency" GP and handle any urgent cases. If you're urgent then one way or another they WILL fit you in - you do sometimes have to be prepared for the GP to run very late though as they will also be the one that gets called out to people at home or to certify death etc so it's always made clear that they might be late. If you're a "super urgent" but not quite hospital they will try and jiggle things and get you in with another GP...

My surgery runs on very similar lines and in fact the only grumble I have is that my own GP is extremely popular and also takes a month's annual leave at a time so sometimes I have to wait a while if I want to see him in particular.

On the other hand, my son had a raging throat infection last week so called surgery at 5.30pm to request next day appt only to be told to come straight away and see duty doctor. We were in and out within 10 mins and back home by 6pm, complete with medication!

Can't complain at that :T

WolfSong2000

Ah, the joy of GP's . I go to two different practices depending on whether I'm at home (England) or at Uni (Scotland). The English practice took 5 years to diagnose me with an underactive thyroid, and I only found out when a nurse rang me after a blood test last year and told me to come in for a repeat prescription. When I asked what repeat prescription, as I hadn't prescribed anything, she seemed very embarassed and told me to come see the doctor, at which point I was told that they'd known for a while that I had an underactive thyroid, but there had been a mixup, so I'd never been told...great.

Then when I came back up to uni after that, I was told that contrary to my request, the English practice had registered me, so I was no longer registered at the Scottish practice...so, had to re-register there and requested that my file be sent from England to Scotland. After 3 months of constantly calling both practices I have up...English one kept saying they'd sent a copy, Scottish one kept saying they'd never received it...eventually I got the English practice to fax a copy, which the Scottish one received, but wouldn't accept and destroyed "because they don't accept faxes"...almost a year on, still no records in Scotland from my English practice.

I also have a rather bizarre GP here in Scotland...*every* time without fail I see him (still trying to get dosage right for thyroid issue and have some other issues) he asks me if I have a brain tumor. Every single time...from my POV it's becoming a running joke, but I am starting to get a little paranoid. He also talked to me once about his wages, and how he was only earning about £70,000 per year instead of the £100,000+ doctors in London and the South East (where I'm from) do. I thought that was a little inappropriate, but seems to be his style...also received a lecture (after telling him that I don't drink, smoke or do drugs) on why it was okay for me to get totally wasted and do drugs at my age, and what the effects of certain drugs such as ecstacy would be. Why do I care when I have no intention of taking it?!

He was however helpful when I spoke to him about getting the HPV vaccine...At 22 I'm too old by government standards, but I am still technically a candidate. However, because of my age, government wont pay and he pointed out that this is contravening my human rights. He's started a petition to get the government to acknowledge that some people over 18, including myself, are not only still potentially suitable, but also they're wasting so much money on 16 year olds, etc, for whom the vaccine wont be effective.