"First Class Treatment from the Opthamology team..."

My wife has now been visiting the Ophthalmology team at K&C for over two years now and has made over 20 visits and we think she has received excellent treatment.

However, this has been repeatedly been let down by the utterly useless bureaucracy supporting it (very badly). If you stick to the appointment you are eventually sent - although this frequently fails to happen - you might be okay. However, try to reschedule or chase up a missing appointment and you enter a nightmare only a novel by Kafka can prepare you for!

The phone almost never gets answered - at any time of day - and no amount of messages left will result in anybody calling you back - ever!

My wife is currently waiting for a biometry appointment, which she must have before the urgent cataract operation the consultant told her at a recent appointment they are able to do before Christmas...providing the biometry is done. Despite them being available for this, the urgent biometry appointment has not yet been received - after nearly one month - even though the consultant put her down as urgent and said she would hear in around 7-10 days. Even if an appointment couldn't be arranged - you would at least expect to have heard something. After 2 weeks my wife began trying to chase this up, she has rung countless times, left messages and also left messages with the secretary - none of which have been answered or acknowledged in any way.

We still have no idea if the urgent operation, tentatively arranged for before Christmas, is to take place or not.

After what must be hours of messing about it has been completely impossible to find out anything at all about it.

My wife is young, but I can't imagine how an elderly person would cope with this.

Utterly impenetrable and massively inefficient.