It is impossible to get through to this surgery by telephone, you receive a busy signal constantly, making it extremely difficult to book, change or cancel an appointment. When raising this issue with the receptionists (if you are lucky to speak to someone) you are told to 'drop-in' to make an appointment etc. which is impossible when you work 9-5pm, the same hours as the practice. You can't even try and call in your lunch break as they close until 2pm. Without exaggeration, for three separate reasons: booking, changing and cancelling an appointment (over three separate periods), I tried calling for weeks at a time, making over 20 redials each time, without getting through. For one of these occasions, my husband had to go into the practice to cancel it for me (due to a family death). I've stopped going there because of all this frustration, which was exasperated when I had a dental emergency (a follow-on from my cancelled appointment), and, again, could not get through on the phone over many weeks. In the end I was able to 'drop-in' because I’d taken a half-day off for a hospital appointment, only to be told that I'd have to wait three weeks. At the time I was annoyed by the receptionist who challenged me when I stated that my filling (the reason for the emergency) had already been paid for, and she only conceded when I produced the receipt but never apologised for the error or accusation of untruth. And I was not offered a refund when I stated I had to go elsewhere for have the pain dealt with. They could fix the telephone problem easily by increasing the phone line capacity, by introducing a phone queuing system, in addition to introducing an online appointment booking service. You should not be penalised because you work fulltime and are unable to 'drop-in'.
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