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Poor service

Posted By cetusgb95

"Poor service"

About: The Willow Group

(as the patient),

Since the merging of four surgeries into The Willow Group face-to-face appointments are extremely hard to get. Even getting a telephone appointment with GP can be a 6 week wait.  Yes, I know about Same Day Access but unless an issue is majorly bad I would not want to clog that service up.  Even so, it is often a Dr just prescribing a medication over phone without seeing me.  And that's all dependent on being able to get through on the phone in the first place! 

I don't think the doctors realise the seriousness of the situation especially the impact on vulnerable patients. When I last saw my GP they cheerfully said long time no see and I replied "Not for lack of my trying".  They then asked if I had been to the Wound Clinic for treatment, and looked shocked when I said I wasn't aware that such a clinic existed.

I did note one copy of a surgery newsletter on the reception counter. Perhaps they could think about sending e-copies of this out to patients who are on email, and perhaps texting others to make them aware of a new issue being available from the surgery.  Of course, having more than one copy would be helpful.

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Responses

Response from The Willow Group 5 years ago
The Willow Group

Submitted on 12/03/2019 at 16:50
Published on nhs.uk at 17:06

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for bringing your concern to our attention, I know this can be difficult and we do value all feedback.

I am very sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the service that we are providing. As a practice, we too find it unacceptable that on occasion patients are having to wait a month to see a GP for a routine appointment.

There is increasingly widespread recognition that General Practice is under huge strain. The Department of Health is now admitting that there are serious problems with GP recruitment. Independent organisations agree that GP workload is spiralling out of control. We are currently actively trying to recruit new GP’s, Health Care Support Workers and Nurse to improve our current wait times but unfortunately recruiting GP’s currently around the Gosport area is a serious problem. We are currently employing Locum GP’s but this is not a long term fix. We are also encouraging the use of other in-house clinicians to help free up GP appointment.

This includes the use of Advance Nurse Practitioners, Pharmacists, a Mental Health Nurse and a Physiotherapist. We do offer our Same Day Access Service for on the day issues. All I can do is apologise and reassure you that we are constantly looking at ways to improve our routine appointment system.

Thank you for your feedback regarding our recent newsletter and we will look into other ways that we can make this accessible to our patient's.

Currently this has been shared on our Social Media pages, on our website and there are copies within our 4 surgeries.

I will feed this back to see if sending e-copies in the future could be something that we could offer our patient's.

We are sorry that you are unhappy with the service provided and hope you feel that we do recognise how frustrating and upsetting this can be for our patients. I hope I have gone some way to reassure you that we are aware and are constantly looking for solutions to it.

Yours faithfully,

Kevarnna Langridge

Patient Experience Manager

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by cetusgb95 (the patient)

Thank you for your response. Since posting, I have been able to attend the recent Willow Group Patient Focus meeting, which I found very positive. It was enlightening to hear that the issues frustrating patients are recognised and that plans to improve the patient experience in various ways are imminent. I will be promoting that appointments can be booked via the Messenger Service on The Willow Group Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/thewillowgroupnhs/

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