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Don't Expect much

Story from nhs.uk

"Don't Expect much"

About: Portsdown Group Practice

Booking an appointment is the first hurdle.

As a patient at Cosham Park House, I phoned for an appointment and after being offered an appointment in Southsea, this was changed to a telephone appointment where I was then told I needed to see someone, but the only appointment was at Paulsgrove.

At that appointment I was referred to the Hospital for blood tests and after a couple of weeks, I had to make another appointment for a further 2 weeks time to get the results.

This time I got to see a Dr at Cosham Park House.

I was referred for further tests and advised that it takes 2 weeks for the results.

After that, I phoned again to be told the results weren't back and the Dr wasn't back until the following week.

I suggested they could chase the results in the meanwhile, but that was not possible.

As Christmas was a couple of days later, I waited until after the break to phone for results.

There was no answer.

I went to the surgery and was advised that the results were still not back by the receptionist and when I asked why they weren't chased last week, another person said that they were looking in the wrong place and the results were back.

She then proceeded to tell me and the huge queue that my results were OK.

As this doesn't actually resolve my issue, I asked what I should do next.

She said I needed to make another appointment, so I said OK, I will do that.

She then says there aren't any appointments available for "routine" matters, but she would be making more available in the afternoon for w/c 7th Jan and I could phone in then.

She also said that I should remember it is Christmas and New Year -

It is not my fault that I was unwell in October and it has dragged on this far without resolution.

If you do NOT have any health worries or need of a doctor, this is the practice for you.

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Responses

Response from Portsdown Group Practice 5 years ago
Portsdown Group Practice

Submitted on 10/01/2019 at 15:06
Published on nhs.uk at 16:05

Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. We are sorry you are having difficulties when trying to arrange a routine appointment.

It is well publicised that access and appointments for Primary Care is going through exceptionally difficult times.

We are constantly monitoring, our staff levels and limited resources, to offer the maximum number of appointments that we can.

We offer available appointments at all of our sites to all of our patients as this provides us with the opportunity, to be flexible with the clinical capacity available to us. We are sorry it took two receptionists to confirm that your results had been received and were ok.

However the receptionist was correct when advising that you would need to make a further appointment and was just highlighting the fact that due to the time of year it may take longer to gain an appointment.

We are also working very hard to try to reduce the number of do not attends that have a huge impact on the number of appointments that are available, at Cosham Park House in December 230 appointments were not attended which equates to 1.9 weeks of lost clinician time that was wasted.

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