"Difficulties booking patient transport"

This story has been posted by Healthwatch Tameside on behalf of a member of the public. We have their details and will forward any comments to them. They said…

A lady had the date for a pre-op at Tameside Hospital and needed to book an ambulance.

Initially, she rang the booking office as she would normally do. That was all going through until she mentioned that it was a pre-op. They then told her that they couldn’t do it, pre-op now have to book the transport themselves. She was put through to pre-op and they said they had been told they were no longer allowed to do it and gave her the number for NWAS.She rang NWAS, and they said they couldn’t do it and that pre-op do it and she should ring them.

At this point, she was getting fed up and told the call handler that she had already spoken to pre-op and that they had been told they were no longer allowed to book them. She told NWAS it was ridiculous that she should have to keep ringing all these different numbers. The call handler agreed and suggested they would put her through to the patient experience department to make a complaint. She refused this and said what she actually wanted was to book an ambulance! She was then given yet another number to ring.

On ringing this number she found it was the initial booking department, and of course, they said they couldn’t do it as they only deal with initial bookings.

At this point the lady was furious and eventually, initial bookings did book her an ambulance whilst stressing they weren’t supposed to!

When she went to hospital to this pre-op appointment she mentioned all the booking problems she had had, and the staff told her they had had another complaint about the same thing the previous week. The ambulance staff also mentioned the problems to the pre-op sister, she too had received another similar complaint and promised she would take it up with her manager.