Student Health Service - Ratings and reviews
Reviews
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Review titled Telephone appointments
Rated 1 star out of 5
by Anonymous - Posted on 30 May 2023
I would like to preface this review with saying I am very aware that this is a busy GP practise that is likely under resourced and doing its best out of a bad situation. I do not wish to publish this review in a way that isn't constructive despite feeling frustrated at the way this practise is run. The main issue I have faced is the telephone appointment system in which instead of giving you an appointment for a particular time or hour long window in a day- they give very large windows of expect a call any time in a 4 hour period. This is very disruptive to the patient's day- I am left wondering whether if I get in the shower for a few minutes I'll miss the call, and having to cancel all engagements for a whole morning for basically a 10 minute phone call. It is also not great for getting any work done because you constantly have to have your phone near you and be ready to stop doing your work at any given moment. I seriously think the service should offer a 1 hour window or ideally a specific time in which to expect a call, otherwise it becomes very disruptive.
Visited May 2023
Review titled Student Health Service
Replied on 19 June 2023
Dear Patient, Thank you for your feedback. Please accept my apologies for the delayed response; I thought it important to take some time to discuss it with other key members of the practice team. Post-pandemic there has been a significant shift towards telephone consultations, which many patients find more convenient. Patients booked in for a face-to-face appointment are given a specific time, but if a clinician is running late, this leaves the patient tied to our waiting room until it is their turn to be seen. Telephone appointments can give patients better options to get on with other activities whilst waiting for their consultation. Currently, we employ two separate approaches to telephone appointments, depending on the urgency of the appointment. Patients are usually given same day appointments with the GP or Nurse when it is understood that their problem is urgent. Where this is the case, we do expect that patients prioritise their health over other daily commitments and are therefore willing to be fitted in to a busy clinical schedule. Because they are one on a list of urgent patients for that day, their position on the list may shift as the day progresses, if other patients present issues where a more time critical response is needed eg symptoms of meningitis. It is for this reason that patients booked onto this list are just advised that they will be called in either the morning or the afternoon. For routine appointments patients are given an approximate time but are advised to allow up to an hour either side of the nominated time. The clinician may call them earlier than this time because cancellations or patients not attending may mean that they unexpectedly have time available. Rather than waste this time, they will try to contact someone further down this list who may be available to complete their consultation. A clinician may call later than the nominated time because they have had one or more patients who have presented with an issue that has taken more than the 10 minutes allocated. However, we do recognise that our patients also have busy lives and find it challenging to fit medical appointments around this, and frustrating not knowing exactly when they are going to be called. With this in mind receptionists give as much ad hoc guidance as they are able as to when a patient might expect to be called. Furthermore, a minimum of 2 attempts are made to contact patients booked in for a telephone consultation. If the first attempt fails, the patient is sent a text to advise that the clinician will try to call them again. If the clinician calls earlier than the nominated time, this does not count as one of the two attempts. Thank you for your feedback on this issue. Team leaders have had a long discussion about what mitigations can be put in place to address patient concerns in this area, whilst still maximising the use of available clinical time. It is a discussion we intend to continue. Louise Jones Practice Manager
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Review titled the worst gp service imaginable
Rated 1 star out of 5
by Anonymous - Posted on 30 August 2022
The doctors do not care about you at all, will ignore your symptoms for months and not even properly listen but make stuff up in their mind and just give you antibiotics and basically hope you never return. Dealing with this is forcing me to pay for private healthcare which as a student is far from ideal but if you actually have a serious health issue these people are not going to be any help either go to a proper gp or private. If zero stars were possible it’s what they’d get after 2 years of being ignored as i’ve cried in front of the doctors because my symptoms are so worrying. The whole team needs to learn sone empathy or even go back to med school. Avoid at all costs because you will only feel worse when already ill.
Visited August 2022
Review titled Student Health Service
Replied on 31 August 2022
Dear Patient, Thank you for your feedback; I am very sorry to learn of your unhappiness with the care you have received from our service. If you would like to provide us with more detail, we would be very happy to look into your concerns about your treatment. You can do this by sending an email to bnssg.shsadmin@nhs.net marked for my attention. Details of our complaints procedure are available from our website www.bristol.ac.uk/students-health/making-a-complaint/ With kind regards, Louise Jones Practice Manager