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Accessing psychological therapy through Talk Wandsworth

Posted By ArtisticCrepe

"Accessing psychological therapy through Talk Wandsworth"

About: Care Opinion Talk Wandsworth

(as a service user),

I am starting my third course of therapy through Talk Wandsworth. I am very impressed with the quality of the care I have received so far, in terms of the therapists themselves and the positive impact on my life. However, there have been multiple difficulties around scheduling appointments.

I was scheduled to start this course of therapy last month, and received a text, an email and a letter confirming my appointment time and the name of the therapist. The following week I had a call from Talk Wandsworth informing me that the therapist they have assigned me is not qualified to treat my condition. I was told that I would be contacted again within a month to rearrange my appointment with a new therapist. 

This is not the first time I have heard this; last year I was assigned a therapist, my appointment was confirmed, and then I had a call informing me that the therapist they assigned me was not qualified to treat my condition. This makes me question the process used to assign therapists - what is the point of assigning a therapist to a patient without first checking whether the therapist is suitable to treat that patient? Moreover, on the most recent occasion that this happened, I had researched the therapist online and was convinced that she was very qualified to treat me.

Today is the day of my rescheduled appointment, at 3pm. At 1pm I had a call from the therapist themself, who said, "Unfortunately I have to cancel your 2pm appointment due to an admin mix up." We have rescheduled the appointment for next week, but I am very unhappy that my appointment keeps being delayed, and that the therapist did not have the correct time for my appointment anyway.

Some notes on the form I'm using to submit this: There's a drop down to select whether I am a service user or a patient (or other options). As far as I can tell there's no difference between a patient and a service user - I even googled it. Please clarify the form by deleting one of the options or explaining the difference.

I'm then asked to select the conditions, test or treatments in my story. There are two tick boxes underneath: one says 'end of life' and one says 'using'. Using what? Does this refer to the use of drugs? There's got to be a better way to ask for the information you're looking for.

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Responses

Response from Engagement and Experience Co-ordinator, South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust 5 years ago
South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust

Submitted on 20/11/2018 at 10:25
Published on Care Opinion at 15:37

Dear ArtisticCrepe

My name is Farai and I am the Engagement & Experience Co-ordinator for the Trust.

Thank you for taking the time to share your story about your experience at Talk Wandsworth. I apologise for the delay in responding to you, I was contacting the team in order to respond to your story. I am pleased to read that you have been impressed with the quality of care that you have received so far from this service, but I can only apologise for the multiple difficulties surrounding the scheduling of your appointments. I spoke to the interim clinical manager and they wanted me to convey the following message to you:

“We are sorry to hear of this persons experience and would like to express our sincere apology. We have worked hard to improve our admin systems since last year and have introduced the following:

Therapists who offer a specialist treatment – such as EMDR, have this clearly documented on our database system. Admin use when booking slots so it should be very rare something of this nature occurs. Admin will confirm with clinicians in advance of booking appointments if they are unclear on who is best to support the service user.”

However, they have been made aware of a similar recent mistake made by a new member of staff who has since received more training on the procedure. This issue should therefore no longer occur.

On the point of the therapist contacting you and not being clear on the appointment time they would like more details of this so they can investigate it fully as it goes against their standard procedure. If you can please contact the PALS department on 020 3513 6150.

Once again I am sorry about your appointments and if you If you would like to raise this as a formal complaint please contact the email the Engagement & Experience Team at complaints@swlstg.nhs.uk or call 020 3513 6150.

Kind regards

Farai

Response from Sarah Ashurst, Associate Director, Service Quality, Care Opinion CIC 5 years ago
Sarah Ashurst
Associate Director, Service Quality,
Care Opinion CIC

I support people to use the Care Opinion website

Submitted on 20/11/2018 at 16:08
Published on Care Opinion at 16:34

picture of Sarah Ashurst

Dear ArtisticCrepe

My name is Sarah and I am one of the senior moderators here at Care Opinion.

Thank you for your feedback on adding your story to Care Opinion. I would like to answer the two points you raise.

1. Why we show both service user and patient - we do this because we work with lots of different services across both health and social care. In some services people identify themselves as a patient, and in others a service user. People can feel quite strongly one way or the other so we want to give people the option to choose. Though I do appreciate it can add a level of complication, we don't have any plans to remove these options

2. The suggested tags including "end of life" and "using" - the Care Opinion website tries to suggest useful tags based on words in the story to make the process easier for the story teller. However this clearly did not work well and I am sorry about that. I have sent your comments to our development team. This is the team that is responsible for building and updating the website. I am sure there is something we can do here to improved this.

Through hearing feedback from people who use our website, we can improve the website for everyone so thank you for taking the time to share this with us and I hope I have answered both your comments about the Care Opinion website. If you want to know more or have further questions, you can reply directly to me on here (by writing in the box underneath this response) or you can email me on sarah.ashurst@careopinion.org.uk.

With best wishes,

Sarah

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