Chobham & West End Medical Practice 2014-08-14 Person 3 5 0

The new appointments system is a disaster. You need to wait for at least two weeks for an appointment to see your own doctor or even a blood test. This is totally unacceptable. The doctors in the surgery are generally very good but when you have an on going condition you want to see your doctor; one who knows the history; one who knows you; one to whom you are not just another patient. Consistency is key. My daughter recently had a seriously debilitating condition. She was prescribed antibiotics and told to see if they worked. If not she was told to make another appointment. That would of meant another two/three weeks wait in agony. In the end she saw 5 different doctors and had four different doses of antibiotics, one of which was the same one but with a different name. Consistency would of saved her the suffering and reduced the time it took to fix it. In the end she was referred to a consultant who supplied the fix after a short investigation. Had she been able to make an appointment to see her own doctor within say three days there would not have been the delay. My wife recently had a blood test the results of which required another blood test. She was told that the next available slot was OVER two weeks away. She asked her doctor to telephone her and she explained the situation. The doctor said that she should say that the doctor wanted her to have the blood test within X days. Amazingly a slot became available. This should not be necessary. It wastes the doctor's, the patient's and the receptionist's time. This is a relatively new situation and has obviously been brought about by a change of process. Up until relatively recently it was possible to always see your own doctor within a week. Emergency appointments were handled within a day or two at the most with whatever doctor was available. From a patient point of view this is totally unacceptable and the appointments process needs to be refocuses on the patient, not the surgery. I could suggest a solution, but I am not being paid a healthy salary to manage the surgery. In addition the introduction of the new online "rules" regarding ordering prescriptions in very clumsy and the implementation was badly mishandled. Firstly the form that you need to fill in to get access means having to fill in information which the surgery already has. Your name and NHS number should be all that is necessary. In addition, you should be able to fill it in online. The online system itself is "clumpy" and not user friendly. The bit about having to add a note to the request is ridiculous. If you want to know where the prescription will be collected from simply have a selection of options with radio buttons. And what happens to patients who are not IT literate and have broadband available? But the worse bit is the refusal of the staff (under a dictat no doubt) to accept telephone requests for non repeat prescriptions. How can someone get to the surgery to make such a request if they are ill? Has any thought been given to that? Such prescriptions are normally extremely important. What is the difference of someone phoning for a proscription and someone going in to fill in a piece of paper?This stinks of bureaucracy gone mad. No doubt the cry will be "Data protection". I reject such a smoke screen. In addition, the implementation of the new system was totally chaotic. Again no thought had been given to the patient and the system was brought in without any warning to the patients and indeed to the staff who were not aware of the implementation on the day it was brought in. For such a large change to the process there should of been a proper project management plan involving all stakeholders. This was obviously not done. The person responsible should be given his or her P45! The computer system also appears to very limited and compounds the appointments chaos as it only works a month ahead. Any appointment which is greater than a month ahead cannot be made by the staff. How crazy is that?