Doctors appointments, rare as hens teeth?

[melika]

Had to wait a week to see a doctor to get blood results. Had to wait a whole month to see a particular female doctor and have just booked her again and have to wait another month! My DH is suffering with joint pain and I tried to get an appointment yesterday and there was nothing left for weeks, I was told you have to ring at 8am today. So.....I did and couldn't get through until 8.15 and all the appointments had gone!

I am flabbergasted.

Receptionist said if he turns up between 8.30-9am
and 2.30-3.30 and says it is an emergency he can wait for a doctor.

So that is what he is going to do but it isn't an emergency! You have to lie to get seen. And...what is an emergency? If it was I would take him to A&E surely?

I picked this surgery after we had recently moved because it has ten doctors!!! What the hell is going on?

Pisci my practice is pretty big - on their site it says they have more than 12k patients - is that big?

It is also not an affluent area, and has many OAPs and families with small children, so I would expect fairly heavy usage.

But they are just really organised, somehow! Online and telephone booking, emergency appts on the same day and "sit and wait" appts. Receptionists lovely, always running on time, phlebotomy clinic most week day mornings if you need a blood test.

I don't know how they do it, but I am grateful! I genuinely wonder what they do that others obviously are unable to?

Interesting oldfarticus this is a prime example of the GP bashing I was discussing with you on another thread. This thread started off discussing GP appointments and has been littered with GP bashing, we are all whiny and don't give a shit.

Couple of points-

1. Not all GPs are self employed (I'm not) and don't have a say in how the practice is run.
2. I certainly do not earn £100k!
3. Giving a patient a year's worth of tablets may make financial sense and may not 'waste' patients time but it is not good clinical practice and I would not be comfortable doing that.
4. My comrades on here have explained things in a better way than I ever could. But we are not 'whining' and yes long hours are to be expected in any profession. But it doesn't make it any less challenging and exhausting when you are in a position of responsibility. It's like how MNers often teacher bash when they work bloody long hours too.

Anyway, I need to reinforce my old policy of avoiding these types of threads because they annoy the bejeesus out of me.

And nearthewindymill it's probably not the GPs refusing to give you more thyroxine, it's probably got something to do with medicines management and the CCG to make sure we prescribe cost effectively AND safely. Direct your ire at them.

Oh I see you already have (it's late and I missed your post about the director of pharmacy).

How about joining your practice or neighbourhood patient participation group where you can speak to the practices and the CCG and actually make a difference instead if moaning about it on here?

And to the poster who says who do we see. Well I work in a massive practice and we offer booked and walk in appts, telephone triage, even email consultations.

Every day my surgery is full to the brim in the day and we have extras on our list every day.

I've worked in my current practice for a few years now and the demand is increasing. However be funding for more staff is not. Therein lies one of the main answers as to why it's hard to get an appointment...lack of funding. Lack of funding for doctors and also lack of funding for GP recruitment. We're heading towards yet another recruitment crisis, half my friends are struggling along to find locums as the jobs aren't out there. If you want to blame someone blame the fucking government for screwing the NHS over. We're doing the best we can with barely any money.

seethes and definately hides thread this time

My DR's the same as you OP. I remember once calling every morning for two weeks and 3days before I could actually get an appointment. (By which time urine infection developed into bad kidney infection)

Now I just don't bother going and try to deal with it my self or just ignore things I'm worried about. I know it's not the best idea but I can not be arsed with phoning every day for weeks on end to get to see a DR. I currently have 4 separate ongoing issues I really should see the Dr about but won't because of the hassle of getting an appointment.

Should also note I'm very lucky DD is in good health and doesn't need to visit the DR very often - I do make the effort to get her an appointment when she needs it.

go to a walk in centre its what im doing today if i get no joy with the doctors unfortunately you won't get an appointment its the holidays everyone wants one in the holidays!

But the fact of the matter is, is that if practices were better organised and more efficient I wouldn't have felt the need to make that call because had the repeat been acted upon and the instruction given via the drop down box on the email been followed I'd have been happy to collect from the chemist four times a year. But those intstructions were never followed and there was never much of an apology either.

Cripes you lot really don't like constructive feedback do you and you certainly haven't answered too many questions. It's about treating people holistically in my opinion and that would save a lot of time in the longer term.

I expect very little from my GP practice but when I do go there I expect the staff to be clean, polite, competent and efficient. If any GP thinks that's too much to ask then I think that's rather sad. Also no GP has ever properly answered why throxine cannot be prescribed in annual quantities for a patient with my profile. It was something that the eminent Sir Richard Baylis recommended and put in writing for my GP when he looked after me when I was first diagnose (after a GP missed it for about two/three years), explaining to me and reassuring me that this disease needn't ever inconvenience me too much: thyroxine was cheap, had a long shelf life, needed an annual check up for most people and was easily treated.

When resources are supposed to be so limited I find it extraordinary that professional people chose to operate in a "make work" environment that is wholly avoidable and then chose to complain about how overworked they are. I don't ask for that but if they insist on wasting their and my time over things that are wholly unnecessary when I or another family member is actually ill and does actually need to be seen I expect them to be seen and to be seen quickly and effectively.

It's pretty clear to me from this thread that many many GPs simply don't listen and will not take on board or listen to reasoned argument. I don't understand why that is; I suspect it's because we are only the people.

My doctors surgery is a good one. Appointments can only be booked one week in advance, and there are call on the day slots in both the morning and afternoon for emergencies (so never a 4 week wait to see a named doctor). Routine appointments and prescription ordering can be done online. The prescription is always sent electronically to a named pharmacy previously selected by the patient.

I get 2-3 months of medication in one go, which I think is ample. I don't need to see a GP to order more meds. It can be difficult to see a named GP, and this might be part of the problem with the OP. It might be that her GP works pt, and so is only available for appointments 2 days a week, she might have annual leave booked etc.

When I moved into this area, I asked my neighbour for advice. Her dh is a GP elsewhere, and she recommended this practice. I think people with poor GP practices should ask around.

One thing that I am curious about is how GP practices in different areas are so different. Is it down to having a good practice manager? Do some surgeries employ more GP's per number of patients on the books, than others? If surgeries have a reduced number of GP's, do the partners have to employ locums? I get that naice areas may find it easier to recruit, and that many diseases increase with poverty, demographics etc.

The surgery my family is with are pretty bad. You have to make a separate appointment for each symptom/ condition and as I had a whole range of symptoms and didn't know if they were connected (and after seeing a doctor there who just offered me extra strong pain killers and no tests and said no, tge rest of the symptoms were unconnected and I'd have to make another appointment) I registered at another surgery.

I now think the doctor knew my symptoms were connected and just didn't want to do the tests as then I'd be an 'expensive' patient.

Since then, my daughter has been diagnosed with an illness (yes, had to wait a month for each of her appointments and 4 months for each referral). She has been prescribed medicine which we now get through the gp as the specialist retired. So she is getting repeat meds with no appointments, and noone qualified to supervise her condition.

The surgery I moved to is worse. I can't make an appointment more than a month in advance but when I book I am given an appointment 5-6 weeks hence. For my first appointment I had looked up my symptoms and seen a connection and asked for specific tests. I was right, test results came back as low thyroid and ferritin. I've seen all different doctors at the practice because it has taken that long to answer my questions. Even so, I am still collecting a dose of thyroxine (every 2 months) which is based on guesswork, and have had shoulder pain for about a year which has been put down to a pulled muscle and so I'm just putting up with that. I assume this must be because I've used up my quota of appointments for about 2 years, so if it is still hurting then, I'll make another appointment in 2 years time!

Nearthewindy. Actually your problems with prescriptions are bad and although I don't agree with giving a year's worth, I do think that you have a problem with your meds and I would be pretty hacked off about it too. When you register with our practice, if you are on repeats we ask which pharmacy you would like to use and set the computer. If you change it there is a risk that amongst the 100s of repeats each day that it might not get done but other than that it should be fine.

We do though have the problem of cyberspace and occasionally prescriptions just don't appear. We have had days where for some reason several just can't be found and this only comes to light a few days later when the patient is collecting them. Doesn't happen often.

We have some patients on the "chronic medication service" where the script is done for 48 weeks and the patient picks them up at the pharmacy every 8 weeks. (We do 56 day dispensing)

Some surgeries have a much higher demand than others due to the demographics of the area and this leads to variations in availability of appointments. And as one GP said up thread there is a huge increase in demand and workload and a shortage of GPs and a lot of us are female so work part time.

There are some surgeries who are badly run with bad feeling between the team and this passes on to the patients. I get on very well with my staff and my partners and we share problems and discuss things. I think in some surgeries the staff think the GPs are gods and are terrified of approaching them which is wrong.

I don't mind working long hours and I don't moan about them per se but what all of us GPs hate is the constant bashing and that we are useless all the time. It is terribly demoralising and the vast majority of us want to do well.

P

Thats thing Musical most people don't want to bash the doctors after all its your job but its our health and life!! If people are having problems accessing doctors then were are they to turn to? 111 has too many bad reports to be considered 'safe' we know we shouldn't turn up in A&E because it probably isn't either an accident or emergency and I live in a city that doesn't have a walk in centre.

This means if I can't see a doctor within a couple of days my problem does become an emergency - to me at least - if it impinges on my life too much then it might actually become an A&E problem. So perpetuating the problems A&E have.

And going back to my mum and dad - the doctor is doing home visit for him every week as he near the end of his life, but surely someone should also be keeping an eye on my mums health after all if she didn't look after my dad as well as she does it would be costing us 'the taxpayer' a lot more money by him being in hospital. Surely her waiting to see her doctor for over 5 weeks when she might need the reasurance that her doctor can bring is too long in the circumstances - dad could be dead and buried in that time!!

I agree with Isforty. I want to be able to respect the service I receive but there are so many barriers before one actually gets to see the doctor it is difficult. The receptionists make mistakes, lose test results and compound it by barely looking up as one walks in, barking at you if you dare ask where a surgery is so by the time one actually gets to the GP's room one's smile has faded a bit and you expect it all to go rather wrong.

Is it really too much to expect the reception staff to look up and smile when you walk in? The way ours have barked at some of the elderly people since the new log in yourself thing has been intalled is dreadful when the elderly have tried to book in at the desk. The doctors must know too how they speak to people but at my surgery I expect they think it's OK.

Actually, this thread has done me a favour because it has given me the push I need to change doctors. The service I've been getting in recent years since the old partners retired has really not been up to snuff. It;s a shame because it does make one tar the profession with the same brush.

musical you sound genuinely lovely and remind me of my own GP :)

May I say something without offence, though....?

I always feel sorry for NHS professionals because I think that whilst all public sector workers get battered in the press, you have it worst (teachers a close second!). My profession (academic) gets bashed a lot - greedy universities, no point in doing a degree etc - but not like yours. And the vast majority of clinicians I come across in the NHS are smart, kind, helpful people and I appreciate them.

That said, I do find that whenever drs are discussed on mn there is a peculiar defensiveness. When you see threads about a problem with a teacher, often teachers will weigh in saying they agree, the treatment the op has received isn't good. I don't know if it's just me, but I find drs on mn less likely to accept criticism or bad experiences that patients have - and often posts which are quite balanced are categorised as "bashing" drs.

I think people get frustrated because they post about legitimate problems and then many drs just seem to write in and say "do you have any idea what hours I work, my budget is being cut, stop bashing me" which isn't really an answer to a legitimate complaint. Do you see what I mean.....?

Revolting, I do see what you mean and I think it is just the political and economic scene at the moment. It is such a shame that so many doctors (not just GPs) are retiring or leaving the profession.
I'm sure all public sector workers are the same but the amount of meetings we have to have to discuss admission rates, referral rates, etc. Because these meetings are with district nurses and other teams we have to cross off surgeries to have the meetings to tell us what we already know. It's daft.

Revolting - I think many doctors are simply cautious about criticising medical care on a forum such as this. Without knowing the full background it is impossible and sometimes unethical to comment, and that may come across as defensiveness.

In 'real life' I have reported colleagues who I felt were underperforming - I'm just not really comfortable with saying your GP sounds crap on here.

Having said this - I am guilty of being complacent and too accepting of the system and its flaws. Am also a little averse to criticism - I blame my type A personality.

God this thread is depressing. I'm not surprised that the NHS is losing GPs by the bucketload. It's so much better being a doctor abroad. The demand for appointments has sky rocketed, the money is gone, staff are having to be laid off its soul destroying to work as an NHS GP these days. We are heading for a huge recruitment crisis. I wouldn't like to grow old in the UK anymore, am planning my retirement abroad, if I don't already leave beforehand to pursue my career elsewhere.

Bunny and Musical - yes I see what you mean. Of course it is hard to comment responsibly. I also know I went through a period of not reading the Guardian education articles because they were so bloody depressing, so I do sympathise.

It is hard to know how to respond as a patient. The NHS is basically set up as a quite paternalistic institution - with the best possible intentions - but that means it doesn't rely in patient action so I am not sure what normal people can do to change things.

Personally I would like to see a culture where patients took on a more active voice in re the NHS, so "complaining" constructively when things are bad and praising where good - in such a way that govt might listen.

I think a lot of the anger that spills over on these threads is on one hand, not wanting to criticise a wonderful public body that's hurting, and on the other, needing to express the anxiety and fear that come from feeling one's health may be worsening and it is hard to get help.

I'm a teacher and of course we are often bashed too, and like GPs often by the Secretary of State. Obviously we are the visible part of the service and if people aren't happy we provide a focus for their discontent. In reality though, I have little say as a teacher over how the Education system works so I have every sympathy for a GP trying to do their best in the system they are stuck in. Both teachers and GPs deal with areas where people are vulnerable - their children and their health.

It is hard at times to find yourself constantly criticised in the media and in real life. You have to pick yourself up and remember that you do the best you can within an imperfect system.