6th Jan, 2009, 8:39pm
The NHS Works
The NHS gets a lot of flack from all sorts of sources, and the media tend to delight in hi-lighting the terrible experiences people have had with the NHS, including horror stories about people being left in trolleys in A&E, people not being able to get access to Doctors out of hours
Over Christmas, my 15 month old daughter caught a nasty virus/cold that knocked her for six, and we ended up calling our local surgery out-of-hours. Several times. Our surgery participates in the local out-of-hours scheme, where there is a central number to call, they take your details & a Doctor calls you back. On each occasion we had a call back within the hour. On each occasion the Doctor was friendly & helpful. On each occasion we ended up taking Zoe to the out-of-hours clinic to be checked, after being given a specific appointment time.
- One the first visit, we were seen almost exactly on time, given a prescription and told which chemist near us was open and able to complete the prescription. We had the visit, prescription fulfilled and were on our way home within the hour. This was on a Sunday 28th December.
- Our second visit, we were seen within 10min of our time slot, given a slightly stronger antibiotic, which the Doctor made up there & then as it was late and we wouldn’t be able to find an open chemist until the morning.
- The third visit was much the same, seen within 10min of the time slot, Zoe was thoroughly checked over & we were advised to finish the current course of medication.
The out-of-hours clinic is 15min from our house, there’s plenty of parking, the staff are friendly, the staff there are who the out-of-hours telephone number goes to.
Craigavon Area Hospital & Lurgan Medical Practice, hats off to you, your system works, you were there when we needed you and you delivered a service you should be proud of. I for one am glad that my income tax is being spent wisely.
More noise needs to be made when the NHS does something right, constant negativity is only self fulfilling.
I’m fully aware that this was fairly simple primary care, and that things get a lot more complex with serious medical conditions, but that why I choose to pay for medical insurance that covers these major things. Having a service that’s available 24 hours during the holidays when you have a sick child is a mind saver, if not a life saver.
1 Comment »
Kevin on 07 Jan 2009 at 3:02pm #
Glad to hear your little one is well again, and none the worse for the adventure.
I’ll add a similar tale from the holidays where the system didn’t work quite as well. Our little one came down on Boxing Day with some bug or other, and the temperature spiked up to near 39C on the first day. Luckily the magic pink medicine managed to keep it down to something a little less worrying and we kept a close eye on her thru the night.
The next day it was up again and made it to 39.5C when we decided that talking to a doctor might be a good idea as it was only the aforementioned pink medicine keeping it down and I wanted to know what was best to do and how high a temp was getting dangerous…I had something in the back of my mind that 40C not good..
Soooo I tried calling the much advertised NHS Direct to try to talk to someone only to get a less than helpful recorded announcement that “This service is not available in your region”….Now i ask you to talk to someone why the heck not!
OK look up the GP’s on call arrangements on the web…the number to call is the surgery number. Odd I thinks, but maybe it diverts me
Soooo… call that (more expensive than need be 0845) number and the helpful machine tells me that the surgery is closed and to call another (less expensive) number for the regional out of hours service (why couldn’t they have put that number on the website in the first place…bah!)
Call that, and (to give her her due) a very helpful woman took all the details, and said they were snowed under with similar cases of kids sick with high temperatures and the wait could be up to 4 hours and they were calling in more doctors, and if the temp went over 40C to call back and they would make it a priority case
Thought OK…her temp hasn’t gone over 40C and someone will call soon so I left it at that and waited…and waited…and waited..
5 and a half hours later a (once again) very helpful (and probably v.overworked) doctor called us back, and took details, and gave us advice on how to keep the temp down. I’ll give her credit she did ask did we feel we needed to have the little one looked at that evening which as we were managing to keep some sort of lid on things we declined.
Thankfully the temperature went down, and nothing more serious emerged. Not exactly a horrendous tale of waiting on trolleys etc, but I still can’t help thinking that it took way too long to even be able to speak to someone to get advice.