"Excellent doctors, unpleasant and incompetent..."

This surgery has the most lovely and competent doctors who really listen to you and make sure that you get the best care possible. And the nurses are fantastic too. Unfortunately, it is totally let down by receptionists who at best just don't want to help you and at worst are rude to you. It is nearly impossible to get an appointment, as it is based on a call in on the day system, with only a few appointments able to be pre-booked. What's worse, if you call in the morning and all the morning appointments are gone, you then have to call back after 2pm to get an afternoon appointment... You call then and all those appointments are gone too (or you forget to call because life happens and you are busy in the afternoon). It's a ridiculous system. They are very bad at doing prescription refill requests. We had one sent by the pharmacy which they wrote for us and kept there for pick-up instead of sending it back to the pharmacy who requested it.... Another time I called because a prescription refill hadn't arrived at the pharmacy and was over 10 days late and I had not one, but two members of staff condescendingly explain to me that prescriptions sent by post take 3-5 days... They wouldn't listen when I said I knew they took longer but that it was 10 days late and then they finally checked and I was right, it had been too long and it must have been lost in the post (or never sent at all). It's not nice being treated like an idiot when you are in the right and they are in the wrong... indeed, why treat the patient like an idiot anyway? It's not like I was being out of order or anything, as I am always polite in my requests. Even if a patient is wrong about something, they could be kindly listened to and gently explained what the situation was. Another time the instructions for writing the prescription were clearly not communicated to the doctor, and I had to return to the surgery to get it re-written 3 times because the pharmacy kept rejecting it. Another plus, to not simply complain here, is the waiting room is quite nice and we enjoy the children's books there.