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Freshwell Health Centre
2016-06-09
Person
4
5
0
Written by a patient
Written by a patient 9th June 2016
The surgery and staff are excellent. However, over the last 3 months appointments have become difficult to get. It is now at least a week often more before you can see a Doctor. If you want to see the same doctor again it can be a lot longer. Yet when you finally get there, the waiting room is mostly empty. My wife was recently hospitalised and when she came home having been told to see her GP it was 2 weeks before we could get an appointment. We have never had to wait more than 3 days before. What has gone wrong?
21st June 2016
Response from Freshwell Health Centre
Firstly, thank you for your kind comments about our staff. I am sorry to hear of your recent negative experience of our appointments system. We ourselves are aware that access to our routine face to face appointments has not been quite up to our usual high standards over the last three months and we have been trying our best to manage it as well as we can. One of our doctors has been absent on maternity leave and unfortunately despite our best efforts we have been unable to find sufficient locum doctor hours to cover her absence. Our list size is also increasing quickly of late complicated by a reduction in funding for the practice. I am not sure if you are aware, but we offer good access to our doctors by phone. In the event that a patient makes it known that they feel that the soonest appointment offered is not soon enough, our receptionists are instructed to offer them a telephone call from the doctor. The doctors respond to their phone calls around lunchtime on the same day. Many things can be sorted on the phone but if the doctor feels that the patient needs to be seen urgently, then the doctor will invite the patient in to be seen. Please rest assured that any patient who needs to be seen on the same day will always be seen. It is unusual for the waiting room to be completely empty but please be certain that we are not on the golf course or enjoying a leisurely lunch down the pub! A waiting room may be empty for a number of reasons: we may be dealing with our patients in a timely manner, we may be doing telephone consultations, home visits, in a meeting or wading through our administrative jobs which are unfortunately very numerous and time consuming. On occasion some GPs start their surgeries earlier or later than others which also leads to a quieter waiting room at certain times. We work as hard as we can continually through the day and our working days are long. Your comments are anonymous but should you wish to discuss things further with a member of our management team then they would be happy to meet with you. Dr David Oliver, Senior Partner