"Poor Experience"

I had a horrible experience at Louth Hospital phlebotomy department, the phlebotomist was very unkind to me from the beginning, I felt their response to my reasons for attending there for the blood test rather than my GP surgery was unnecessarily cruel. No compassion, no understanding and extremely ignorant to some of the difficulties patients can have and the need for reasonable adjustments to be made in some circumstances. 

Myself and many others have been here before for a blood test and never had a bad experience so I was really shocked. I came away feeling very guilty and upset - this experience will taint future interactions with healthcare professionals and make it harder to trust unfamiliar professionals because I fear that others will be the same. Please update your website and online booking form to say that blood tests at the Louth Hospital phlebotomy department are for hospital patients only to save confusion, others having a wasted journey and such an unpleasant interaction. 

I would like to add that if I hadn’t been able to book online and attend at the hospital for my blood test unfortunately I wouldn’t have been able to attend at all for a very long time and they were due and necessary to be done now not in 6 months time - they have revealed findings that require attention and close monitoring which could continue to develop into something much more serious if we don’t keep on top of it. By the time I might have been able to successfully physically attend an appointment at my GP surgery, due to my health needs, for a blood test, it would potentially be too little too late for us to do anything about it and the irreversible damage would have been done.

At this point in time thankfully it’s still very early days and there are things we can do. I worry what I will do now I probably will need more frequent monitoring of blood levels because using the hospital service won’t be an option. I’m a young person, I have to live in this body forever and I could end up very poorly and be left with permanent irreversible damage if this continued to progress undetected, that’s why additional support and reasonable adjustments are so important if someone needs them, it’s already so much harder for disabled people to access healthcare and there are so many health inequalities, finding these abnormalities as soon as possible is so important to prevent further deterioration, suffering, damage and also reducing strain on the NHS. 

I’m really sorry if I was asking for too much and I’m sorry I got it wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing trying to make the best use of the limited NHS resources and prevent wasted appointments & distress but clearly I was wrong.