My experience is somewhat akin to that of
@debs248. The system is atrocious. Individual HCPs generally want to do the right thing, but hindered by the administration.
We moved 30 miles to be closer to my daughter; her suggestion and very much our convenience. The Surgery we left was small and personal, but being forced by NHS England to amalgamate with 3 other small practices; we were increasingly frustrated by the increasingly poor service and mishaps from the shared processes from this phased joining up of 4 practices.
Our new facility is a large single Medical Centre, serving the whole town. I have a named Dr, but can never get an app't with her. So the suggestion from
@Ged falls at the first hurdle: getting to see any Dr is a challenge, but I have twice been given an app't with Health Care Assistants who can't write prescriptions, without getting their decision signed off by someone else the next day. It's hard to see, never mind trust, your Doctors if you can't speak with your named GP or even see the same GP at successive appointments.
Our large Medical Centre seems to have a significant backlog of reports and letters that are delayed in their processing. Worse, once a report or external letter is finally processed it appears on my records as a 2 line "Docman" entry, registering its existence on their system on the date of registration, but absolutely no detail about why, who, what or when. I gather the GP's can see a link and read the detail, but I can't. A phone call asking something that needs an administrator to look at my records, attracts a further identical "Docman" entry. It's recording that my NHS records have been accessed, but I can't see why. So I now have to make a calendar entry that I called the MedCen and why, so I can explain to myself why I have some of the 37 Docman entries in the last 12 months. Some of those clerical Doccman records are purely internal MedCen paper or electronic processes.
I had a Urology Consult a week ago for a relatively minor but necessary matter. The Consultant I saw was difficult to understand, quietly spoken with a heavy accent. He was thorough and I felt he'd understood well that there were 2 problems, one relating to a Prostate procedure from 3 yrs ago in a Hospital from a different Trust, doing a procedure that his Trust didn't do. This procedure seemed to be failing and was now having a consequence for an otherwise unrelated Dermatology problem. He recommended I try to reach back to the other Hospital and see if they could do a corrective procedure and possibly resolve both issues. I choose to wait for the Urology Consult report, to be sure I'd correctly understood the Consult. It arrived 7 days later, I had understood and so I tried to get a phone app't with my named GP to discuss the practicalities of firstly whether a 2nd referral would get me back in front of the original Consultant and secondly whether the recent suggestion that both issues would be resolved together was a good strategy. It felt sensible: pause, reflect, understand where this might all take me - before trying to reach back and get 2 different procedures done simultaneously; or even whether I should defer the 2nd procedure before being sure the original problem was fixed!
But the MedCen administrator wouldn't take my request for a GP appointment without being able to connect it to the recent report that I'd received by post. Apparently they had not yet received this, even electronically. They wanted to connect my original Uroogy referral request, created then from a phone call with a duty GP, not my named GP. So no possibity of finding a date ahead of that referral report being on their system. I hand carried a copy of the report to the MedCen 15 mins later. But was told that once the report was logged onto the system, it would be passed to the duty GP who would automatically process the 2nd referral and I wouldn't need a GP appointment, nor would the duty GP contact me first! I appreciate that this might seem helpful and kept this moving forward - but it just isn't that simple. Meanwhile the Receptionist, who took a copy of the recent report for the administrator to put on their records, confirmed that his procedures could not include making a GP appointment booking - even though they now had a copy of the report provided by me; I had to phone in on Monday, or raise an e-consult request on Monday between 7-9am and I would be placed with whichever GP was available at the first possible date and time, after their triage process. You can't make these things up - they are so farcical. No concept of keeping the Patient involved, never mind even when the Patient is asking to speak with their named GP about the referral report.
