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Emergency appointment

Story from nhs.uk

"Emergency appointment"

About: Pathfields Medical Group

My partner is 15 weeks pregnant and has been suffering with severe morning sickness. She hadn’t managed to keep any fluids or solids down for 2 days.

When she called the Pathfields practice to get an appointment she was told that there are no appointments free today and the list of emergency call backs was also full.

She was told by the receptionist “possibly try again tomorrow”?!

She has now been omitted into hospital and has been in over night with severe dehydration and has been told she has hyperemesis gravidarum.

I would like to know what the Pathfields practice deem an Emergency?? What constitutes an emergency appointment?

I am certainly not impressed and I’m disgusted with the fact that a pregnant women is not able to get an appointment when she is severely ill!!

I look forward to hearing back from the Pathfields practice with their response.

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Responses

Response from Pathfields Medical Group 6 years ago
Pathfields Medical Group

Submitted on 07/11/2017 at 11:53
Published on nhs.uk at 14:33

Thank you for your important feedback and we must start by apologising profusely for the lack of care your partner received from us in this case.

Your partner's call should have been put through for a doctor call back promptly.

You mentioned that you wanted a response from us and we feel it is important that we do respond - we're doing so here but for a more detailed response please make contact with our complaints manager so we can further investigate what went wrong and address the specific issues and training needs in this case.

In order to respond to this complaint we need to put it in context with the current state of the NHS and the adaptations Pathfields has made to cope:

There is a rising demand for GP care in the NHS and this demand is increasingly in excess of the resources primary care has to meet the demand - the issues are related to both a lack of government funding and a staffing crisis with not enough doctors progressing to GP training and a large number of GPs retiring now and in the next 5 years.

This is a national crisis that can only be resolved by a dramatic change in government policy but this is seemingly not forthcoming.

To try and tackle the gap between demand and provision Pathfields has moved to a system where we triage all calls and seek to identify patients with urgent issues and offer truly urgent appointments.

On a typical day we get in excess of 200 calls which is unmanageable so we have to cap the incoming calls after a certain number of calls have been requested.

The system should however work flexibly for patients with urgent and important problems such as in this case and your call should have been forwarded to the GP promptly.

This system normally works well but in this case it did not and for this we must apologise.

ACTION WE WILL TAKE /ARE TAKING

1) We will raise your partner's case in our daily practice safety briefing to ensure this does not happen again.

2) We are also actively recruiting more staff but this is challenging with the current workforce crisis.

3) We would also like to look into your partner's case in more detail and would appreciate it if you could make contact with our complaints manager to open a dialogue so we can better understand what went wrong on this occasion.

We very much hope that your partner is well on the way to recovery and once again our sincere apologies.

Dr James Boorer

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