"Not great, not very bad"

With Covid and staff shortages, every clinic is feeling the pressure, but can’t say this clinic support was above and beyond. Very hard to book an appointment, that might be related to reasons above, but the system doesn’t really scale.

Appointments by phone around 8am (having wasted a previous day, start ringing at 7:30am and when call finally gets through at 8:05am still there’s no vacancies), or online but could never get it to work, account deleted somehow, need to go down to clinic to get a code in person, staff doesn’t really know what’s going on with online accounts.

Why doesn’t the NHS app works to book appointments? Why so many different providers to handle patient data? Had to accept 2 different third party providers, one to send messages, and another to look at appointments, for this clinic in the NHS app, with the warning “This Clinic has chosen X provider, please agree to share your data”. Plus the third party mobile app to book appointments.

Doctors are interested, but it is so hard to book follow up, the doctor probably thinks the patients don’t care, and the routine drop-in appointments feel rushed and indifferent (as it is a routine appointment, other times are more suitable for other analysis), although the Clinic may not be too busy during those times.

All in all, maybe due to all the stress from chaotic last years, not very involved and caring clinic, and facing the risk of being totally unfair, have to point out the uttermost respect has always been the norm, just not as engaged with people.