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The Red Practice 2017-07-05 Person 1 5 0

I have now been waiting for 3 weeks for some biopsy results. When I rang the practice today, as usual there was a 5 minute waiting time before anyone picked up the phone (I had made sure I was not ringing at appointment peak time). The receptionist advised me that my results were " no action needed", which could have given me the impression that my results were clear. As I had some doubts however, I rang a second time (another 5 minutes wait) got through to a second receptionist and asked for a phone consultation with Dr. Tilly, the GP who had referred me. I was told the next appointment was on the 31st (i.e. 25 days from today!) or I would need to ring again in the morning. On my insistence, the receptionist went to speak to Dr. Tilly, who clarified that there was no action needed on her part as she was still waiting for the histology. When I asked the receptionist to explain the term histology, I was told that she was not qualified to answer. (One would have thought that for anyone working in a GP practice the word histology must be fairly recurrent and that any however non-medically qualified person would have googled it or asked, as I just did, to realise it meant that the lab results had not come through yet.) So: 1. in the space of 30 mins the answer of the receptionists had changed from "all clear" to "no results yet". (It was only because I had a previous incident during my pregnancy (15 years ago) when a receptionist had erroneously told me that I was HIV positive that I doubted the first statement.) 2. over 3 weeks after my clinical intervention I'm still waiting to hear whether I have a form of skin cancer or not.