Sorry for slow reply - thank you for the nice messages about my hopeless GP/hospital. It is bit of a saga so apologies for the long post but I think there is a general warning for others on the thread in this.
My booking in appointment is Saturday when I will be 12 weeks. I have been told that I should expect the scan "a couple of weeks" after the booking in appointment. When I pointed out that they would be over 14 weeks and therefore very late I was told I was "exaggerating" and it is a "little bit late" but not "very late".
As you can imagine, that went down very badly. I have pointed out that the critical question is whether it IS late or not (which it is), not HOW late they have left it.
The position is that if a women is not given the nucal scan before 14 weeks, then they will be offered a different downs syndrome test from the combined test because it will be too late for the combined test. This means, you don't get tested for Edwards or Patau's until mid-pregnancy (at the abnormality scan) and for Down's they use a quadruple test (which is a blood test), the results of which take at least 2 weeks and probably 3 to come back. Which leaves you in the position of not knowing the result until (at the earliest 16 and more likely 17 weeks, assuming the original scan is does at around 14 weeks). Without wanting to open a debate about choices, that does mean that if it were to come back with a high risk, that women has been carrying a baby for over 4 months and will have had to tell family & friends the news. One of the reasons for doing the nucal test earlier is to give women the time to decide what their next steps are if the test comes back high risk. It also means that it isn't possible to work out the risk of Edwards or Patau until 20 weeks.
I'm fuming because whilst I have taken the decision to pay for a private scan and Harmony test, there are lots of people not in that position or vulnerable women who might not know when they need to have the various tests.
I spoke to the practice manager and set all this out. Her view was essentially that the risk is very low and therefore this is unlikely to be an issue in reality. That still isn't my point. If it were an issue, if I were to only find out at 20 weeks that my baby has Edwards because of an "admin" error at their end when I otherwise would have known at 12 weeks, that is significant. At that point she started backtracking on the administrative error and saying she is sure they did fax the referral to the hospital after my first GP visit but "it must not have arrived".
I chased the referral three times before I received anything back so finding it hard to believe.
The moral of this (long) story for anyone who hasn't heard about their booking in appt date within a couple of weeks of referral is chase and keep chasing.