I’ve cried about 3 times today. On holiday in Suffolk from Sussex, desperately trying to get a GP appointment for my son. Here’s how it’s going…call our home GP for prescription & they send it through to pharmacy, his rash worsens, we need to get a doctor to see it in person. The rash can’t be photographed/videoed due to where it is. It’s not an A&e issue (trust me) and so try to get appt as a temporary patient at local GP surgeries. Every one I call has a receptionist who asks me tonnes of questions, I can almost hear them thinking ‘extra paperwork no thanks’, and then tells me they’ve actually run out of telephone triage appointments today (how convenient) and to call another surgery or 111. By the afternoon I give up and call 111. Two phone calls and 6 hours later from health advisers to check if I ‘still need a phone a call?’ and a nurse finally calls me back at gone 11pm. She says I need to wake my child up for an assessment. I’m like I’ve just got him to sleep, there’s no way I’m waking him up (and my whole family in hotel room) as I just need a GP appointment and I can discuss issue with her. She refuses to talk to me unless I wake him so has now closed the ‘case’ and I’ll have to go through same process tomorrow. She can’t even see him, how is it as assessment?! It’s a phone call. I could have lied and pretended he was awake for crying out loud.
The system is an actual joke. What are his rights here? He’s 2 years old, he just needs a GP to look at him and prescribe antibiotics or a cream or tell us to carry on doing what we’re doing. Do I just take him to a GP in the morning and hope they let us in, not bother with phoning at all? He’s in real pain. Or do I go to a&e and get ready to be made to feel crap for bringing him in for neither an accident or emergency?
The system is actually broken. I’m close to broken by it tbh.