"Not very helpful"

As someone who doesn’t like to complain and usually takes things on the chin, I have had quite a few poor experiences with Poverest over the last couple of years which have driven me to write this review.

Poverest has been my registered family GP for around 10 years, although I very rarely visit. For as long as I have been making my own appointments, the service has generally been bad. Some staff are helpful, others are unhelpful, you never know what you’re going to get.

I left for uni for 3 years and while I was there I re-registered at a different surgery. Once finishing uni I fell ill and attempted to re-register and make an appointment at Poverest, where I was told there was “no room” for me. My mother asked if I could take her place as it was urgent I saw a doctor, but despite the receptionist doing all she could to help, I was told there was nothing that could be done at that time and that I should try a list of other practices.

After spending a full day driving around and trying to register at other doctors surgeries, I was told I was not in the catchment for any of them, which I would have expected the Poverest surgery to know before sending me out to them. I called back to explain that I couldn’t sign up to any other doctor, to which a different receptionist told me I was actually registered with Poverest? So all in all a complete waste of time.

For the last two or three appointments I’ve made, I’ve been told that there are no appointments for at least 3 weeks (on the most recent occasion it was 4 weeks). I understand that it is probably not within their control as they are clearly over capacity, however I also feel as though 4 weeks is a very long wait time.

On top of this, the phone line is always busy and it’s almost impossible to get through to make an appointment in the first place. So this morning, I decided to try and call at 8am on the dot to try and book an emergency appointment. Despite my call being connected on THREE occasions, each time whoever picked up the phone did not speak and hung up after a few seconds, even though I could hear people talking in the background. This is appalling.

I can’t remember a time I’ve visited as of late where I haven’t had to wait at least 30 minutes after my scheduled appointment time to be called in by the doctor, once I was kept waiting nearly an hour and wasn’t informed by anyone that my appointment was running late.

Lastly, my doctor tends to be quite unwelcoming and patronising, I would say I’m a very tolerant and fair person, but for one of my family memebers to change doctor for the same reason says something. I do understand that the surgery may be over capacity which would explain long waiting times for both booking appointments and scheduled appointments, however this combined with poor treatment by both staff and doctors is just unacceptable and the surgery needs to do know and do something about it.