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"Average"

About: Riverbank Medical Centre

The telephone triage system is a nightmare and reception staff take an astonishing amount of time to answer the phone. Once you get through you then have to ask a Dr to call back and then wait up to 4 hours for that call. It doesn't really make any sense. Surely it would be more efficient to have the possibility to request a callback online so as not to waste people's time for 15+ minutes waiting to get through to speak to a reception to simply ask for someone to call you back? How no one has realised yet that this is a ridiculous system is beyond me. Either more reception staff are needed, they need to be more proactive and efficient or they need the capability to offer more services online.

People do not follow up on queries now; whenever I have needed services that are for the admin staff, and not doctors i.e. secretaries and reception staff, nothing ever gets done when they say and they need to be chased constantly or things drag on for weeks and weeks.

Having said all of this, our family doctor is wonderful and I trust that she knows what she's doing, which is the most important thing. Overall this GP surgery is okay, and having the attached pharmacy is helpful along with the ample parking. I would suggest they need to invest more time into looking at alternative ways of offering services and making sure their administration staff know what they're doing and follow up properly.

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Responses

Response from Riverbank Medical Centre 4 years ago
Riverbank Medical Centre
Submitted on 03/02/2020 at 10:49
Published on nhs.uk at 11:34


I am sorry that you have found the triage system difficult. We changed to this system following patients feedback about the regular appointments system. It ensures that we can treat the sickest patients the fastest, rather than them wait for the next available appointment with a GP. We have recently reorganised our reception team to have staff who are solely answering the telephone so hopefully this will help with your concerns. Regarding online services , this is again something that we are looking at expanding.

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