"GP / Patches"

Once again (second time in as many months) I called into my GP surgery on their request to make an appointment to discuss blood results.

As per usual I am told no. No appointments, can't book you one. Call at 8am tomorrow and maybe we can help. 

My daughter called one morning a couple of weeks ago starting at 8am and it took 84 attempts to get through by 8.45 - of course by then it's -all appointments for today are gone, please call back tomorrow. 

I am in work at that time (night shifts finishing at 10am) so I have no chance. 

The receptionist suggested I use patches to contact the doctor which I went home and did. 

I filled in some badly written screens of data (I am an IT professional and would be embarrassed to produce code like that it's really not good) only for the system to tell me it thought I was contacting it about a skin condition. 

I had mentioned no such thing - all I did was post about the difficulty of getting an appointment that the GP had requested I do. 

This does not instil confidence in the software if the AI gets it that wrong. 

A few hours later I get a message from my GP saying to contact them and they would make me an appointment for next week. Oh one of those appointments that you couldn't make a few hours ago no way no how? 

Pretty standard for a service that has to show that it sees 95 percent of patients on the day they book an appointment. In my opinion, that statistic has totally messed things up for us service users - to maintain targets the surgeries simply won't give future appointments. That way they can say they saw all booked patients same day. 

Stars out of 5 for the whole process? Zero.

I feel constantly let down by the whole service. I do not want any special treatment because I work weird hours but I do want treatment. Ongoing chronic conditions need treatment but maybe not on the day of booking in. 

Always funny how things get sorted when we get in contact through channels that cannot be denied or deleted or ignored.