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Long term poor performance

Story from nhs.uk

"Long term poor performance"

About: City Walls Medical Centre

Over a period of 20 years the performance at this practice has deteriorated. The stock response about being busy due to coronavirus is only the latest excuse, difficulty in getting an appointment, let alone continuity of treatment with one doctor is impossible.

I now sit at 10 am repeatedly trying to get an appointment, the line is engaged and eventually when you get through, sorry all appointments are taken, call tomorrow or, next available appointment for your chosen doctor is 2 weeks away and I have to phone up again in 10 days to make the appointment. You cannot get continuity with a single doctor, different doctors give conflicting opinion

When you speak to doctor they clearly have never reviewed the recent history - particularly annoying when the practice has asked you to make an appointment.

Once you strike lucky and manage to speak to a doctor and have made the effort to and waited for the chance to speak to them a second time some are good, however others really do not care at all and take the lazy option of lose weight, healthy eating choices, exercise particularly, frustrating when you have already many times been through that loop with no change in the problem you consulted them for in the first place.

The answerphone message for the past year has said go online to book your appointment, you try, but the online booking is suspended due to COVID - how hard is it to change an answerphone message?

The administration, the phone service and the booking system is archaic, the staff unhelpful. You get a text saying contact the surgery, they ask you why you are contacting them, you say you received a text and they say what would that be in relation to! They can’t even look at the notes.

NHS critical care great, the GP service is broken and the complacency towards listening and responding to criticism is endemic.

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Responses

Response from City Walls Medical Centre 2 years ago
City Walls Medical Centre

Submitted on 26/04/2021 at 16:20
Published on nhs.uk at 18:57

Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment on the NHS website, we are sorry that the practice has not met your expectations. I would have welcomed the opportunity to look into and respond to your complaint personally but you have left the response anonymously so we cannot look into this further.

However, we as have all GP surgeries had to change the way we work during coronavirus to ensure the safety of our patients and our staff, unlike the majority of practices we have remained with an open door policy throughout, switching to telephone triage to reduce footfall in the practice and to avoid patients attending the practice unnecessarily. The demand on the telephones due to the increased number of outgoing calls has affected patient’s ability to get through as well as clinicians being able to call out and we are looking into ways of altering the system to avoid affecting in or outgoing calls and the possibility of purchasing further telephone lines.

We have the ability for patients to have continuity of care; this can be through the clinician for all of the patients care or via discussion with a clinician for a specific problem.

All of our Doctors act in a professional manner, this sometimes means giving patients information that they do not wish to hear, but is in the best interest of the patient.

The answerphone message has not been changed, this was due to the ever changing information during the pandemic and not knowing when we would be able to add appointments back online, this is something that we are currently working on and are hopeful that with the reduced numbers of COVID outbreaks we will be able to update very soon.

I am sorry that you feel the reception team are unhelpful, they work extremely hard and maintain a professional manner through some extremely difficult situations, if you have any specific concerns please raise these with the Office Manager who will be pleased to look into this for you either by listening to the telephone call and/or speaking to the receptionist.

Again I am sorry if you feel that the practice is complacent to responding to criticism, we take all feedback in a positive manner and aim to learn from it and adjust our ways of working where applicable. We worked alongside of Patient Participation Group (PPG) to gather feedback via our feedback response form and would discuss areas of concern at our PPG meetings; unfortunately we have not been able to have a face to face meeting with the PPG since COVID restrictions were put in place but aim to restart these as soon as possible.

I do hope this has answered your concerns but do feel free to contact the practice directly if you wish us to look into this further.

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