"Bad experiences of reception staff & booking..."

The majority of the reception staff are uninterested and unhelpful.

You can stand for a while at the desk before they even acknowledge your presence & when they do decide to speak to you things often don’t get any better!

Fortunately, myself & my family are not often ill , but looking back over the last 5 years, on the rare occasion that we have needed to see a GP, this is what has happened:

. My husband became progressively unwell over a couple

of days and one afternoon came home from work & went straight to the surgery. The receptionist looked at him and said ‘I can see you need to see a Dr , but no one here has time to see you. You better go to Urgent Care. ‘

. Another time I rang at 8am to get an on the day appointment for one of my daughters.By the time I managed to get through just after 8:05, all appointments were gone. Was told to ring back at 8 the next day! Same again. By day 3 ,my daughter had become ill enough to finally be seen as an ‘emergency’ ( but not until mid afternoon).

I attended a nurse’s appointment at Granville Road & she booked me a follow up at MPA for a blood pressure check. When I arrived for it I was told it wasn’t on the system. No apology. No, sorry we made a mistake, let me fit you in as it only takes 2 minutes to check blood pressure. Instead it was you’ll have to come back in 3 weeks .

One daughter booked in advance to have a vaccination before starting uni. When she attended the appointment, the receptionist snapped at her because she didn’t know which staff member she had been booked with ( she had not been told!)

A more recent experience of an unhelpful receptionist at MPA ( who seemed to have some kind of god complex) came the day after we had been at Queen Mary’s Urgent Care with one daughter. The contrast between the friendly, professional and caring treatment my daughter had received at Queen Mary’s , compared to the attitude of the GP receptionist,made me think of all the previous experiences we have had ( listed above) . Each individual one may not be huge, but theses are pretty much our only interactions with the surgery and none of them are positive in terms of either the receptionists, being able to get an appointment or both.

I suppose we have put up with a poor service as the incidents were spread out over a period of time but I guess that this also shows that our experiences were not one offs but are a reflection of how this medical practice operates from day to day. Time to change surgery!