Marcham Rd Family Health Centre 2023-01-03 Person 1 5 0

I have been unlucky enough to be a patient at Marcham Road Health Centre for five months, from August 2022. When I moved to the area, I asked for a referral to the nearest Gastroenterology department so that my ongoing care for Crohn's could be transferred. The GP I spoke to at Marcham Road Health Centre said that if I wanted to be transferred, I would have to do it myself by speaking to my prior hospital and asking them to do so. This is not something that patients are asked to do, ever, and nobody outside this surgery that I spoke to had ever encountered such a request. However, everyone in Marcham Road Health Centre, from receptionists to GPs to the practice manager was adamant that they could not refer me, and I only managed to convince a GP at this practice to refer me in late December 2022. I felt, and continue to feel, gaslit by this refusal. I have lived in five different regions of England and Scotland and been a member of countless GP practices, and Marcham Road Health Centre is the only one that has refused to refer me to a local Gastroenterology department. The result is that I did not receive a referral for four months, during which time I had no gastrointestinal care, and my health has deteriorated during this period. At this moment, I am booked in to see a specialist in August – a year after I moved and asked to have my care transferred. I have test results that require clinical attention, but no clinician to assist me, and I cannot access resources such as the local IBD helpline. I do not blame the hospital for the lengthy wait, as they did not receive my referral until late December. All blame falls on Marcham Road Health Centre. To compound matters, Marcham Road Health Centre and their in-house dispensary have managed to misplace each request for my repeat prescription I made during my time there. Every time I have requested my repeat prescription – something I do on a monthly basis – I have found myself forced into a position where I needed to run around Abingdon and Oxford in order to find somewhere that can fill my script on a short notice. The most recent time, I requested a repeat on 14 Dec 2022 via EMIS, which Marcham Road Health Centre's dispensary claimed not to have received. I then physically handed Marcham Road Health Centre's dispensary a copy of my repeat: when I came in to pick up the medication from the dispensary, they claimed once again to have not received the request, which is an unlikely claim given that I handed it in to them in person. I finally managed to get the last item on my repeat from a Boots in central Oxford on 2 Jan 2023, after having run out entirely. Marcham Road Health Centre is by far the worst GP practice I've had the misfortune to register with, and I consider that they have been actively dangerous to me thus far. I am planning to leave before they can cause me any more damage.

There are two exceedingly simple things that I needed from Marcham Road Health Centre: a referral and prescriptions. The practice has delivered neither of these. I do not see a way to ameliorate this without replacing all the clinical, administrative, and dispensary staff who have failed me. It is therefore unfit for purpose as far as I am concerned, and I am exercising my right to leave.