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"Staff and patient communication?"

About: The Grey Road Surgery

I understand that the surgery is busy and so on, but I was told that forms would be at the desk for me to collect. One of the tests requested was an immune response test, in which I had to eat and drink the food stuff that was suspected to be making me sick. I had done this and turned up to the surgery feeling unwell but ready to have the blood samples taken. This was the day after the request forms had apparently been sent to the reception desk, so I was fully expecting the forms to be there by then and ready for me to take upstairs to have my bloods taken. This didn't happen, and after spending most of the day feel tired from feeling unwell... I was not very happy about the situation.

I understand that there are mistakes sometimes and miscommunication, but test forms are important and whatever system the surgery is using for communication between the reception staff and the doctors needs to be improved so that people aren't turning up expecting to be properly tested for autoimmune responses and having to be told to come back the next day, and having to go through the same unwell experience for another day.

I wasn't the only person who had this issue of miscommunication, since there was another person at the reception desk also expecting forms.

Please sort your IT out.

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Responses

Response from The Grey Road Surgery 5 years ago
The Grey Road Surgery
Submitted on 29/11/2018 at 10:41
Published on nhs.uk at 12:07


Hello, thank you for your comment. If you had asked to speak to a member of the team they would have explained that we do not prepare test forms ready for the patient to collect, we ask for the patient to attend reception and they will print them out. The forms are ready in your medical record and its just a case of them being printed.

The reason we do not print them is mainly because we do so many tests, if we printed each one with the understanding that the patient would collect them; the majority of patients don't do this leaving us with reams of test paper that we have to destroy. This is a waste of nhs resources. We therefore stopped printing them prior to collection for this reason and also for data protection as it was becoming to difficult to manage the amount of forms left uncollected.

I hope this helps you understand our processes and the reasons why lab forms aren't pre-printed.

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