"Poor experience of SWLSTG Contact Centre"

I am a patient under the care of East Wandsworth CMHT at Springfield Hospital. Both the SWLSTG website and my care plan state that if I wish to discuss my care I should contact the named professional in my care plan. However, having recently tried to make contact for a routine reason I found this to be extremely difficult. In my experience, the ‘Contact Centre’ is misnamed, because the role of the switchboard operators appears to be to prevent rather than facilitate access to clinical staff.

My consultant psychiatrist (my named professional) invited me to contact themselves or an administrator by telephone if I wished to bring forward an appointment. When I needed to do so I rang the switchboard/contact centre and identified myself as a patient and the reason for my call. On the four occasions I phoned I was given the following ‘reasons’ for not putting me through to my consultant:

Consultants are too busy to answer the phone

Doctors don’t take phonecalls

Doctors don’t talk to patients

Consultants are in clinic all day every day

I find these reasons to be somewhat spurious. Having a mental illness makes me ill, not stupid. Being spoken to as if I am stupid is upsetting and stigmatising, and not what I would have expected from a mental health trust.

When I asked if I could speak to an administrator, on two of the four occasions the operator said a message would be passed on to the CMHT; however, nobody ever responded to these. On another two occasions the operator said that they had tried to connect me with an administrator but nobody was answering the phone, so I should call back another time. They said it wasn’t possible for me to leave a voicemail.

After the fourth failed attempt in ten days I felt I had no choice but to contact the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) for assistance. The intervention of PALS led to a call back from a CMHT administrator, for which I was grateful. However, I don't believe it should be necessary for PALS to intervene to facilitate such routine contact with clinical or administrative staff, particularly when I was only trying to follow the advice on the trust’s website and in my care plan. Overall this was a deeply disappointing experience and left me feeling as if the trust is actively deflecting patients in their attempts to seek help.