"appointment by phone"

Thank you for taking the time to comment. We were sorry to hear of your poor experience. I have spoken to the Conatct Centre Manager who has advised the following: "Thank you for your email, as I mentioned on the phone with incidents like this I will usually attempt to trace the course of events back using the patient's contact number. As the patient is anonymous on this occasion it is difficult to determine which numbers they called and where they had been routed too. That being said based on the comments below it looks like the patient was ringing a clinic reception directly as the original number on the appointment letter would have been the clinic number or the Appointment Centre depending on the speciality. During the second call it is likely that the patient was ringing a secondary phone on the same reception as these numbers are available across the internet and in some places on the main CUH website. I am confident that they had not been ringing the Contact Centre as our average wait time has been 25 seconds so far in January and our longest wait time is no more than 3 to 4 minutes which we have worked very hard to reduce over the last few months. I would also add that as this query links to a clinic reception and the calls seem to have been made around 17:00 there is a chance that the caller was ringing a service that was closed and no voicemail had been activated, which unfortunately does happen on occasion. Whenever we are made aware of this the Contact Centre Team will always raise this with the clinic as soon as possible. I am sorry I have not been able to offer much assistance or comfort for the patient as their frustrations are obviously fairly founded and do not represent the level of customer service we are trying to achieve." I hope this is a helpful response. If you were able to contact PALS to advise which number/clinic you were calling we will happily look into this further.