Seeing it's a bit quiet round here and some of us are a bit "progressed" in years and may have experience with this....
Interested to see if this is just something that happens in Oz or round the world.
having just moved house, my prescription for my Diabetes tablets that the mrs thought she knew where they were, aren't.
having gone a couple of ays without them already and feeling the effect, I went to a medical centre to get a new script to procure some more pills before I keeled over.
Went to the counter, asked how long to see a doc, told 40 Min. I could put my name down and come back to make the wait shorter. Beautiful. Gave the health card and other details, confirmed time to come back and went for a walk past the the 100 out of 110 shops that catered to womens fashion and came back. Yep, no problem, 2 in front of you won't be long. Nice.
55 min later i'm still sitting there. go up, aqsk how much longer, they don't know, doctors have gone to lunch. WTF?? When will they be back? Don't know, when they are ready. Say fking what?? and exactly how long were they going to let me sit there like a shag on a rock before I was seen to?
Ummmmm.....
I give them a real good serve and one of the receptionists says, I come on at this time and I always cop the brunt of this. I said well clearly you need to look at the procedures if it happens all the time and have a bit more respect for your patients and let them know. She said it doesn't happen all the time. I said well clearly it happens with enough frequency you resent it and it's a problem for you as well as the patients.
She said the doctors have to have lunch. I said yes, and what is to stop them clearing the waiting paitents and then going to lunch? My wife is a manager and she goes to lunch when she can, does not just walk out when the clock strikes and leaves things hanging till she gets back.
Dumb look, no answer.
I said I read all this shit on your website about caring for your patients and giveing the best treatment and respect but this makes that a completely laughable and false statement. The girl said I'm sure it won't be much longer. I said like you told me it would be 40 Min and now we are almost an hour 40 and you still can't tell me how long? I told her all I needed was a script written out which would be 5 min of the Doctors time. I had my old tablet box with me so they could look it all up on the computer and it would be a quick and easy consult.
I told them to delete my details and not to bill my health insurance because if anything came through I would tell them it was fraud as I did not see anyone. Told them thanks for nothing, they'd be happy to know i'd never be back and recommend everyone I knew in the area not to go there either, not that it would worry them because if it would they'd treat their patients a lot better.
I bet as I walked out they said what a rude obnoxious prick I was and what a terrible person etc.
This sort of thing is common here with doctors. Making an appointment is pointless. You book for the hour and might get in an hour later. I don't know any other trade or profession that shits on people like that. You say anything and you get some bullshit about emergency's etc but clearly if you run an hour or more late every goddam day, it's because you are being a greedy bastard and have no consideration for your clients or you'd adjust your schedule to run to time.
I had this out with my last doctor. I told her that my time was as valuable to me as was hers and if she couldn't keep to a reasonable time schedule, to let me know and I'd make other arrangements with someone that could conduct themselves in a more organised manner. I would either get first appointment of the day or first after her fixed lunch time but still, She would often be 10-15 min late although apologetic for it at least.
If she had an emergency, the receptionist whom I was friendly with would ring me and let me know, even though she was not supposed to do that.
I really don't get why doctors think they can run their businesses like this and more so, WTF people in this day and age put up with such shitty service.
It's nothing new. I remember as a kid my grandmother would make sure she was at the doc's early because she didn't want to be late only to sit round for an hour to see the guy for what -might- be a 10 min consult. That would be in winter when it took her 3 min to peel off the 17 layers of clothing so the guy could get to her chest and back to listen to her heart and take her blood pressure.
Does everyone get screwed around like this or are we just particularly lucky here?
