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"Non-working links to Patient Appointment change/cancellation forms"

About: Heartlands Hospital / Ophthalmology

(as a relative),

My wife received an appointment for the Ophthalmology clinic for a date which she was unable to meet and found on her letter that she could complete an online form through the HFT website in order to do this. Believing this to be the most effective and efficient means of accomplishing her goal, she set out to find the relevant form. After a very frustrating search she was unable to find said form and called me. I have now spent in excess of 40 minutes searching the HFT website, following links that ended up providing nothing but irrelevant computer code or generating lists of other references to non-relevant documents or departments. Neither I or my wife consider ourselves to be idiot, nor computer-illiterate, but we seem unable to find the form. How would other, perhaps less able folk manage if we cannot? It seems to me that if you refer a patient to a range of options to cancel or change an appointment, they all must be available and simply available to the average person, not an obstacle course to be surmounted. Unless of course it is your intention to prevent patients from completing this relatively simple task!

I should value your views on this. Perhaps you would test the system yourself?

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Responses

Response from Iona Belgrove, Patient Services Manager, Heart Of England NHS Foundation Trust 10 years ago
Iona Belgrove
Patient Services Manager,
Heart Of England NHS Foundation Trust
Submitted on 11/09/2013 at 11:41
Published on Care Opinion at 11:56


Dear Frustrated 28

I am very sorry you found the IT appointment system not user friendly. This is not the Trust intention for our services users to experience. I have asked the Appointments Manager to look into it and see if we can make it more effective.

Kind regards

Iona

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