"Terrible service"

My mum was moving furniture and had to phone her local doctor's surgery, where I feel that she has received the worst care ever.

My mum ended up in hospital last summer with pneumonia and pleurisy as she was seen by a practice technician but it seemed to be considered unnecessary for mum to be seen by a doctor or to be sent for an X-ray or any scans to see why her back continued to be so painful, although she kept going back to the practice on a weekly basis. My mum thankfully hadn’t had to go to doctors very often, so I feel this in itself should have been enough to wonder why.

For 6 months my mum has had a sore back. Finally through perseverance and because of the extreme pain she has endured she finally got an appointment with a doctor.  She was sent for an X-ray and a CT scan as the doctor said she couldn't be left like this.

My mum may have non-secretory multiple myeloma and has to have an MRI scan and a bone marrow test. I strongly believe that had my mum seen a doctor earlier that it wouldn’t have taken 6 months for these procedures to happen.

 Now my mum is on strong medication and at the moment herself and the nurse are trying to get the correct dosage to help with the pain in her back until she gets the results from her upcoming tests. My mum has had to phone the doctors surgery to arrange telephone appointments and again has been spoken to with no compassion or empathy and has been told that there are only emergency appointments available. To me, a woman, my mum, who is in extreme pain with her back and who may have non-secretory multiple myeloma to be told that she isn’t an emergency, is absolutely beyond belief.

The receptionist told my mum recently that the surgery was short-staffed and that my mum should have phoned at 8am. Thankfully the nurse is going to phone my mum in future to discuss her strong pain medication. 

I feel that although there will be procedures and protocols in place in every doctors surgery, which of course there should be, maybe sometimes it would be really good to be treated like a human that is reaching out for help as they can’t continue to be in extreme pain and was wanting a reason to why the pain wasn’t and hadn’t improved in 6 months.

I would hope that employees of the doctors surgery are inspected regularly because I feel the individuals we dealt with should receive training in compassion and empathy. 

Our family are in shock with the outcome of this quite frankly poor and absolutely terrible service and hope that now my mum will get all the answers she has been looking for, although these really could have and definitely should have been a lot sooner.