Reply from University Health Centre
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 14:53:44 +0100

Dear Anonymous, We are very sorry to learn of your personal dissatisfaction with our University surgery receptionists and Doctor. We would normally respond to such a complaint much sooner, and directly in person, but as you chose to post this comment anonymously on a national website we have been unable to follow our usual internal Practice complaints procedure. As with any anonymous comments, without knowing who saw you and what was written in the medical records in context, it can be very hard to ascertain the facts around your allegations of rudeness/impatience given the fact that all of these things are completely alien to the ethos of any healthcare service. Our staff members work exceptionally hard to ensure our specialist University Health Centre can cater for the many thousands of students that are registered here. Their hard work is specifically to assist students, who are often away from home/parents for the first time, in accessing appropriate and timely health care according to their level of need. Demand upon our services can vary considerably from day to day, but we are always very busy given the fact we care for over 16000 patients within Colchester. Our receptionists work exceptionally hard to deal with the many patient requests made of them every day. It can be a thankless task but their role is vital in ensuring appropriate use of all of the precious appointments we provide. This can involve you being told that we are unable to fulfil your expectations fully on some occasions (we are aware this can cause patient dissatisfaction but our receptionists will attempt to explain why such decisions may need to be taken if you allow them to). Just to clarify; dealing with high patient expectation and a “list” of complaints during a single, ten minute consultation (standard UK GP consultation length) is a large challenge for General Practitioners given the volume of patients we assess every day. We could make consultation times longer than ten minutes but this would mean making potentially less appointments available during a working day, which could of course impact upon your ease of accessing available appointments. As a result there may be times when your “list” is triaged by the healthcare professional and you are asked by that GP or nurse to return to discuss such additional problems (only if they are not life threatening and could wait to be discussed on another occasion where there would be appropriate time to do them justice). We operate a nurse triage system at the University practice to ensure the appropriate use of GP appointments on the day. In addition we also now have extended access appointments that can be booked during evenings and weekends (see website or call reception for details). We would of course be very happy to discuss and hopefully resolve this comment with you in person, via our usual Practice complaints procedure, if you ever wished to do so (please feel free to call the surgery and ask to speak to the Practice or Business Manager about this specifically and mention this NHS website comment). You are of course free to register with another local practice if you wish but we would hope to continue to assist you with your future healthcare needs. In this regard we wish you nothing but good health for the future!