Fern House Surgery
125-129 Newland Street, Witham, Essex, England, CM8 1BH Also known as: Fern House 131 reviewsReviews
Attempting to get an appointment by phone is time consuming and not always possible. Using their email system usually means several weeks wait to see doctor of choice so only useful for routine appointments. Timely follow up appointments for Dr of Choice difficult and usually impossible. For those with complicated or multiple conditions seeing an unfamiliar or locum doctor is frustrating when despite feeling unwell it’s necessary to spend time explaining associated problems and symptoms that aren’t within the notes but named Doctor is familiar with.
Fern house has always been a first class experience for my family and I. The reception staff are polite and and a pleasure to talk too. The GP’s and nurses are exceptional. We’ve never had a bad word to say about Fern House.
As per above
It’s often difficult if not impossible to get through on the telephone. When getting through on the telephone if describing a complicated issue it occurred to me, based on conversations, that receptionists probably are not medically training which makes the conversations more difficult than perhaps they need to be. Also the conversations have to be speedy because they are having to deal with queues of people at peak times. So perhaps a heightened degree of medical training for receptionists would help improve things. Also, finding a way to scale the operation such that prospective patients aren’t waiting on the phone for long periods would be an improvement that would help. Even if it were something like an overspill system where calls are automatically answered with the promise of a call back within 15minutes or something similar. It’s not easy dealing with peak time calls but being able to measure response times, the reasons for calls during that time and finding ways to improve things would I think help raise the bar and stop folks griping that they can never get through. Unfortunately without the data I can’t offer suggestions of how to deal with it. But if the data was available, happy to help do some analysis and offer some suggestions free of charge if you thought it would help. Anyway hope this helps.
The phone line is often busy. Often it’s difficult to book an appointment because the doctors are so busy.
Resources
Short link to review Fern House Surgery: http://iwgc.net/eb8ru