Perhaps they would be better reflecting on why patients are like that? Rather than a character assassination, perhaps they should reflect on how many hours they've been sat in the waiting room with no information, or how many previous appointments have been cancelled at the last minute, or what hurdles they've had to jump through to get an appointment at all, or the previous incidences of medical negligence they (and their loved ones) have suffered.
I absolutely accept that a small minority of people are absolute cunts, but I do feel that a lot of "customer/client facing" people don't help themselves and that their customers/clients have previously been badly let down by their organisations, so are already stressed, angry, fed up, etc by the time they present themselves. Same applies whether it's NHS, a retail worker, utility firm call centre advisor, etc.
When my husband and myself travelled 2 hours to a different specialist hospital for his cancer specialist consultant for a 9.30 appointment, for the waiting room to be full, all of other people given the same 9.30 appointment, we weren't particularly pleasant to the receptionist at 11.00 and 12.00 when we asked how much longer we'd be waiting, nor at 14.00 when we finally got to see the consultant only to find he had nothing but a two sentence referral letter, no test/scan/xray results, no record of what treatments had already been given (six months of chemo), etc., so a completely pointless waste of time as he couldn't offer any advice, couldn't say anything about next treatment stages, etc. I never saw his letter back to the original haematologist nor to our GP, but I can't imagine he wrote "this pleasant couple", as by that time, we were thoroughly fed up, hungry and miserable - an already stressful situation made a lot worse by wasting an entire day for nothing!