to think my doctors surgery is extorting money out of its patients

[Abubu]

OK, maybe extorting is a bit extreme but I'm really annoyed.

My doctors surgery have a procedure where you must call up at 8.30 in the morning to book an appointment for the day. If you dont call up pretty much in the first hour you can forget getting an appointment that day. You can book in advance but considering that most of the time you don't know you're going to be ill in advance, most people book their appointments on the day.

They have recently changed their phone number to an 0844 number. I've been on the phone for half an hour waiting in a queue before giving up.

Hubby drove down there for me (it is his last day of paternity leave and we were hoping to do something nice today after I've been to the doctor)

He booked me an apointment for lunchtime which was the earliest he could get as it was 9am when he got there.
However he said that reception had 3 people sitting there and they were making cups of tea and chatting while the phone just rang and rang.

I'm not saying the staff are not entitled to a cup of tea but why make it in the busiest half hour of the day, knowing that there are people hanging on to an 0844 number trying to get through?

I'm tempted to change my doctor over this. Am I overreacting?

How much does an 0844 number cost per minute?

I was going to post earlier to point out that the original post was from 2010, but then I was kind of shocked to see how relevant it was, particularly where 0844 numbers are concerned. Our surgery changed a while back.

Can anyone else book appointments online at their surgery? Some GP computer systems allow this but the surgery have to enable it - at mine this can be great for non-urgent stuff as it tends to be the appointments in the week after the current one which are open to electronic booking. It's a bit of a faff to sign up for the service as you have to go in to the surgery (at least I did) but might be worth looking into / putting some pressure on your practice - like the book-in screen, it can help to free up time at the reception desk.

I think all practices are meant to have a patient participation group now as well - some very detailed information here. Again, I'd urge you to find out if your practice has one, ask them to set one up if they don't, and join it if they do. I'm not advocating a consumerist kind of attitude to the health service, the 'I pay your wages' kind of thing, just making sure people are aware that there are ways to give feedback and get involved in improving their practice.

x-posted with Tea despite our posts being 15 mins apart!

Mine is the same with an 0844 number.

Last time I called it took 45 minutes to get through to be told all the appointments had gone for the day. I said I was going to do two things, call the out of hours service after 630 pm as they get charged £200 plus if a patient uses this and also invoice them for the time on the phone as I would one of my clients. Amazingly there was an appointment available at 1100 the same day.

When my practice moved to the new contracts in 2003/2004 they dropped their Saturday morning drop in clinic but funnily enough kept themselves closed on a Thursday pm which we were told was to compensate staff for having to work on a Saturday. They still don't work past 6pm on any day and no Saturdays.

Now that DH and I both work fulltime, if one of us is ill or needs to take the kids to a Dr's appointment, it's a right bastard pain just being able to make an appointment, never mind actually attend it.

In fact, it's so bad, when I do need to go, I usually ask to make an extended appointment, as I ask about 2 or 3 things at once. No, not emergencies, but still important (contraception stuff, the thing that's prompted me to make an appointment, etc.)

It would all be so much simpler if my GP surgery was able to offer appointments at something like a convenient time (I think our earliest is 8.30am and it goes onto about 6pm? which is when I am at work or travelling to/from work)... this problem would also be alleviated if we were allowed to register at a surgery near work too.

Because at the moment, I'm 1hr (sometimes 1.5hrs) away from home when I'm working at head office, meaning I'm 1hr or 1.5hrs away from my local GP surgery (which is just around the corner...) i.e. I have to take a morning or afternoon off work to actually manage it.

Which isn't possible now that my surgery has gone onto a bastardised system similar to the OP... you have to phone in at the phone line opening time (8.30am) and within half an hour the day's appointments are all gone. So how the fuck am I able to plan that, what with getting my half day authorised at work?

It's utterly frustrating, and doesn't really work now that DH and I are both fulltime. It worked fine and there was no problem when I was part time, because we could juggle stuff around work/other stuff... now, not so much.

The biggest problem I have with going to the GP is I work outside the county where I live. At the moment, if you are registered with a doctor it has to be one in the area/town where you are resident.

Medical records are computerised & surely can be accessed by anyone authorised to do so. 'My' GP doesn't know me at all as I avoid going as much as possible - appointments too awkward, travelling, time off work, etc. I'd be happy to see any doctor and if it was 5 minutes from work or where I happened to be on any given day, so much the better.

I've stopped going for mammograms through sheer frustration - a mobile screening van is regularly sited near my work but I can't go there for my scan - I have to travel 45 minutes to my 'local' hospital if I want to be tested (during working hours of course).

fifteen - ta-da! Certainly not the answer to everything, and I think is expected to be quite a long pilot as there are a number of things to sort out, like eligibility for home visits.

I'm assuming there's no way for you to work from home in order to go in for an appointment? Utterly frustrating.

tribpot, no my main duties involve training (onsite, mostly based at head office but travelling to various offices throughout the area at least 1 or 2 days a week, and DH works on client sides, but is a lot more haphazard than me. at least I know where i'm going to be a few weeks in advance, but DH's schedule can change with only a couple of days notice - nightmare). If even just one of us could work from home, that would solve a LOT of problems (not least appointments like this, but also stuff like having someone in to collect deliveries) - I envy people in jobs where the ability to work from home is literally possible (unlike for us) and also with a nice employer who would be willing to accommodate it, if it could be arranged, of course.

Unfortuantely we're not in London, Manchester or Nottingham, which is where the trials are being done

MsBazinga - so you're basically in the same position as me. You have a pig of a time arranging appointments, and work so far from home that you generally have to book time off work. How do you manage it, if your GP surgery does the "phone in on the day" thing that ours has moved to?

Or does your GP surgery have one of the other appointments systems discussed here?

I only ask in the hope that there's a miracle solution (aside from just not going!) that I might have missed. I DO have the option of saying to the receptionist that it's an emergency, and I think they can guarantee to get you in on the same day if you phone before the afternoon.. but I'd feel very guilty at just lying like that if it's for contraception stuff... because it's not an emergency, really, is it?! (even if it's important, of course)

I'm a practice manager and I'm genuinely asking what you would all suggest as an alternative to the 8am/830am phone in for booking appointments?

I ask because we get patients who complain that there aren't enough pre-bookable appointments and those who complain that they can't get in on the day they call in when they're ill.

We used to have a system of 8am call in for morning appts and 2pm for afternoon appts but that was very unpopular with people who missed the morning slots and didn't want to have to call again in the afternoon.

We offer a call back service once all of the day's appointments have gone and open until 8pm Monday to Thursday (no half days here).

Anything else you can suggest we can do?

Allow people to book several weeks/months in advance for repeats/non-urgent and use up, say 50% of appointments. Leave the other 50% free for calls on the day.
Allow a person who calls at anytime to book an appointment. If I phone at 8 and all the morning ones are gone, why can I not book an afternoon one then, rather than calling back.
Most people know in the am if they need to see a doctor that day.

My Drs have a walk in service for minor stuff every morning , it works really well if you don't mind a bit of a wait ,no appointments you just turn up ,get seen by a nurse who refers you to a dr if necessary

Our surgery is great. Ring at 8am. If engaged you have a ringback option. You always get a morning appointment if you've done this at 8am.

If you feel ill later in the morning or can't do the 8am call, then you can ring at 1pm for afternoon appointments. Again, ringback option there.

Or you can make an appointment for non-urgent at any time - usually within about 2 or 3 days.

And the receptionists are simply lovely. Professional. Kind. Compassionate.

I love my surgery. All women doctors too, which is another aspect that appeals to me (not that I have any issues with male doctors).

youngermother1 sorry if I didn't make it clear but we did get rid of the morning/afternoon calling in system - the day's appts are available at 8am. One problem with allowing people to book too far (more than 1 month) in advance is that we can't always guarantee a particular Dr will be on duty (hols,sickness, training etc) and we've found that many patients would rather postpone than see anyone other than 'their' Dr.

Mrs Micawber we have 3 members of staff answering the phones until 10am and then it goes down to 2. The more people we have answering the phones the quicker the appts go so although patients are pleased to have had their call answered faster they're still unhappy that we can only offer a call back or an appointment for a future date.

pooka do you mean a call back from a clinician or an automated system where you can press a button to request a call back from the receptionist?

usualsuspect we are trialling a drop in service from January so it's good to see it works elsewhere.

I thought calling at 8.30 and using an 0845 number were both standard these days. I don't think the phone actually makes money for the surgery - I've heard it's something to do with being unable to get a local number for some businesses.

I must admit I always call 0845 numbers from my phone at work ...

It is actually cheaper for me to call 0844 tariff so not bad for all....

Tidybush - we have the same, you can't book more than a month in advance because the rotas haven't opened up yet. No biggie for repeat offenders like myself at the moment, I know I need to schedule my blood test for about a fortnight before the GP appointment (in reality probably nowhere like that much time but it doesn't hurt) and there's no criticality about a particular date, provided it's roughly in the right timescales.

Before this current illness I had no need to see the same GP on each occasion, now I would also rather wait to see 'my' guy. My DH has always needed to see the same GP simply because of the amount of history, it would take an age to bang through it every time.

It feels like there ought to be software that can profile the best combination of same-day and pre-bookable appointments based on your patient profile. (Mind you, I would say that, I work in IT). Put very crudely, if you're a practice like mine with an elderly population and quite a lot of people with long term conditions, people don't generally need to be seen that day but do need to be seen regularly and with other medical appointments to schedule (months in advance) can't really be hanging about every 8 a.m. for a week or so getting a slot. Plus of course you've got contraceptive appointments at whatnot which are also not time-critical, so there's quite a lot you could open up in advance, reserving an 'adequate' number of slots for the people who do need to be seen urgently. I wonder how many of your patients would be equally happy (perhaps more so) with an appointment in 3 or 4 days' time when they called in the morning?

As usual there's always the need to balance this against patients who insist it's urgent when it isn't, mine does a telephone triage appointment before you can get one of these (quite right too).

Now this last bit sounds utterly appalling but I wonder if there's also a way of incentivising people to avoid the slots most useful to people who go out to work, i.e. first thing in the morning and in the evening.

The other answer is simply to employ twice as many GPs! Simple, really .

It seems impossible to get to see a GP at our surgery, unless you settle for any old one (and some of them are awful), at a very inconvenient time, preferably that same day - ie you have to wait around for hours, having gone in first thing on the off-chance. The reception staff themselves are exasperated by it. They just can't help.