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Ewell Road
End of the line? Patients of £9m health centre still hanging on the telephone
Patients are still struggling to get through to their GPs, nearly a month after Surbiton Health Centre opened
Patients were forced to endure yet more hours hanging on the telephone line unable to reach their GP as problems continued at the new £9m Surbiton Health Centre. Staff at the health centre apologised last week, and assured patients that the phone lines would be running normally after the weekend. But problems continued on Friday morning and today.
A spokeswoman for Kingston Clinical Commissioning Group said that patients who rang the centre on Friday morning should have been directed to the new 111 out of hours service, but due to technical problems they were left with a busy dial tone. She added that this was fixed by the afternoon. Investigations are still going on into what happened yesterday, she said last night.
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Comments
As of today (4 April 2013), Langley Medical Practice's website is still up and running, with brutally out-of-date location and contact information, and dead links all over the place. If they had ever managed to use their Twitter account effectively, then they could have simply spent 10 seconds to tweet that the phone lines were screwed to save people wasting their time stuck on hold in a never ending phone "queue". They've had WEEKS to do this. BT may have screwed up their phone lines (allegedly) but Twitter has been working perfectly during this period - no excuses for not getting information out.
Even when it does work, this is at best an appointment booking system from the dark ages. Phone on the day at 8am, it will be engaged for at least 30mins, if you get through you are lucky but most appointments will already be gone. Not everyone has the best part of an hour to spend trying to book an appointment, especially not at 8am on a weekday. Is online or advance booking really not feasible in this day and age?
I love that when I was sent a leaflet to inform me that Langey Medical Practice was moving, they didn't even bother to print a simple map on it. Special.
Low stock in their pharmacy when I visited, had to go elsewhere to fulfil my prescription.
I think you will find the problem has arisen because they have changed from BT as a supplier of their phone system
Straight through today but there was a technical problem yesterday. The week before I sat in the queue for more than 20 mins. Still better than Claremont Medical Centre who's phone is continually engaged with no queuing system at all.
I walked in yesterday to give in repeat prescriptions and I was struck by the unfriendly welcome and lack of staff. 3 unknown people on check in and answering phones (private care group? as leaflets were on the front desk) and another section "GP enquiries and prescriptions" which is where I went but with only one member of staff available for 3 computer terminals it was 12 minutes before someone spoke to me, took my prescriptions and told me to put in a box next time. With the old place if I walked up to Langley, I was immediately seen by someone who knew me, and treated me like a person who has been a pateint for over 30 years. There are no names for any doctors etc and just numbered consulting rooms. Very impersonal. I wonder if by joining up admin they now have too few staff who know about the right doctor's patients. Just a thought. I will have to hope I get an appointment when I need one.
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