"Always valued the time I was given"

I had a few appointments and I always found my doctor to be approachable and informative. They always took the time to be extremely thorough and always had students that they took time to explain things to.

The down side is that appointments always ran extremely late - I routinely waited 4 hours for my appointment and whilst it is absolutely understandable that emergencies have to take precedence there was absolutely no communication or update from any of the staff in the rheumatology clinic. This doctor would always suggest a follow up visit within 2 months but it was impossible to arrange an appointment within that time.

It was always so busy and their diary was always so full that I often waited 4-6 months for a follow up appointment.

On one occasion I attended for a follow up appointment and they had lost my test results.

I remember walking past a patient that was complaining to a member of staff (they looked more like office staff than clinical) about the length of time he had been waiting for his appointment and the member of staff told him in quite an aggressive tone that they weren't accountable to him.

I found that quite incredibly rude and inappropriate and I did make a complaint at the time.

I also frequently saw housekeeping staff dragging bags of rubbish along the floor - at various times leaving a wet smear as they were going from corridor to corridor, clinic to clinic and room to room - it struck me that this presented a potential infection control issue.

Finally, I witnessed a patient being collected for transport.

the patient was elderly and in a wheelchair and they had simply been left to sit in a corridor facing a wall.

when they were collected the porter simply grabbed the chair and started to wheel it - with the patient facing backwards.

I found this concerning - the porter did not introduce themself, did not advise the patient that they were about to be taken anywhere and didn't appear to have treated him with any respect whatsoever.

The situations I described are all incidents that I happened to witness and did not occur to me but they are worth mentioning.