Stockport Medical Group (Lowfield) - Ratings and reviews
Reviews
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Review titled Horrendous triage system
Rated 1 star out of 5
by Anonymous - Posted on 29 November 2022
In short, after joining with SMG Lowfield Surgery is terrible. You have to call and explain an issue to an unqualified receptionist, which in itself is undignified. Then a doctor may call you for a chat. There are barely any face to face appointments and everything is done over the phone. If you try and obtain a face to face appointment it’s several weeks out. If a doctor is to call you there is no set time and if you miss the call due to work then they’ll cancel the appointment. This practice has serious failings in administering care and needs an independent review of how they are routinely failing their patients. Making a doctors appointment feel like a lottery win is not what the NHS should be about.
Visited October 2022
Review titled Stockport Medical Group (Lowfield)
Replied on 12 December 2022
Dear patient, Thank you for your feedback. I will take the time to clarify a few points that you have raised, that are not factually correct. 1) All administration staff are qualified and undergo intensive training on patient call handling/confidentiality/safeguarding/identifying urgent medical needs/ signposting. By giving as much detail as possible this enables the staff to direct you to the right person to handle your problem. If you do not wish to give any details, you are not obliged to do so if you feel this is undignified, however the clinician will not be able to prioritise your request. 2) All medical needs are triaged by a GP who then allocated the request to the most appropriate clinician. The method we communicate with you is dependent on what the need is and what method a patients requests. 3) We are offering more face to face appointments than in previous years, if during the initial telephone triage appointment and through mutual agreement that both patient and clinician feel a face to face appointment is required this is booked immediately. Due to the unprecedented demand which now outstrips the capacity we have, we have no alternative but to triage every call as this enables us to deal with a higher number of patient requests and prevent wasting F2F appointments when they are not required. 4) We understand that if you work then it can be difficult. We do make a note of times that are convenient to call, and our clinicians do endeavor to meet these requests were possible. We will attempt to make contact with a patient on 3 occasions in the day and we do not cancel the appointment. We are sorry that you feel that the practice has not met your needs, however under the current pressures that the NHS is facing, we are still managing to offer approx 194 F2F appointments , 211 telephone appointments and manage all test results, hospital letters, prescriptions, referrals etc in a day. I do hope that your medical need has now been address, and if you wish to discuss this further then please contact the practice with your details so that we can look into your specific situation. We do not like to hear that any patient has not received excellent care, and always keen to see if improvements can be made to our systems to help. https://www.stockportmedicalgroup.nhs.uk/about-us/practice-policies/patient-rights/complaints/ Regards Wendy Povey Practice Director