"BIG Mistake"

Dear Madam,

I am sorry to read that you were unhappy with the services which are provided at Bannockburn Surgery and that you felt that you were not treated with empathy and with compassion.

Please let me reassure you that we take empathy, compassion and patient care with utmost importance and try to run our services based on these principles supported with evidence based medicine. I am very happy to go through the issues which you have raised in your review with you personally at a time of your convenience at the surgery.

Please understand that we are regulated on a national level as to when we can initiate the immunisation programme for babies, which is why you were asked to bring the baby back at the age as designated nationally for Child Health Surveillance. This national guideline is outside our control and there is nothing we can do about this, so we hope you understand that we had to ask you to come back.

We understand your frustration to come to our walk-in clinic before the end of the clinic time and not been seen, but our walk-in baby clinic service every Wednesday morning is very popular among our patients.

It can get very busy and when it is busy, it is not uncommon for patients to wait a significant period until their review as all staff are working to full capacity to try and meet the demand of our patient population. The service is advertised as being from 9-11am, however, and based on the high demand, it is not at all unusual for us to work well beyond those hours to fulfill the demand. This, however also means, that we generally still have people waiting to be seen at the very end of the walk-in period (or beyond). As you had come literally at the closing of the clinic with less time between your arrival and the closure of the clinic that is required to treat your child during the clinic hours and with other patients waiting, we hope you understand that we did not extend our clinic even further at such short notice and that we had taken into consideration that in your case, it was not an emergency (for further information, the nurse actually had a further three patients to see on that day with multiple injections required). I apologise if you felt that you were not treated with respect and empathy as this is really not our aim and I am sorry that you regret choosing our surgery.

We completely understand your issues regarding your smear test and I am sorry we have not had the chance to speak to you face to face about this, as I would like to as the subject is complex with regard to smears in the postnatal period.

Please note that we will wait for a short period after a woman has given birth before we do a smear test and so the delay would not have effectively changed anything.

Finally, I would like to ensure you that punctuality is something that is taken very seriously by all staff at the surgery. There can, of course, be instances which make an individual late for work which is outside of their remit of control. However, it is more likely that the staff member had a later start on the day you are referring to. Please note that clinic start times vary from 7am, 8.30am, 9am and 10.30am so it might have been that the individual was not late to their clinic.

As initially outlined, I am more than happy to discuss these issues with you personally, so please do contact the surgery and we can further arrange, with Best Wishes, Dr Sabrina Ong.