Mother ‘disgusted’ at Wellington Medical Practice
A Telford doctors’ surgery which attracted complaints over difficulties seeing a GP has come under fire again, despite claims that improvements have been made.
One patient claimed he had tried to call Wellington Medical Practice 97 times last September, only to find it was engaged each time.
Health chiefs said improvements have been made since then, including a new management team and new internet appointment system.
But mother-of-two Karena Cater, who has been a registered patient at the GP surgery since 2014, claims the situation at the GP surgery has not improved.
The 38-year-old, of John Broad Avenue, Wellington, said she has wasted hours trying to call the doctors' surgery for an appointment and is often cut off before she gets through.
Ms Cater said she spent a week trying to get through on the phone to book an appointment because she had been worried about a lump in her stomach and eventually decided to go to A&E.
She said: "When I started off there, the service was really good. Over the years, it's got worse and worse.
"No matter what time of day I'm ringing, I'm constantly on hold.
"I get to five or six minutes on hold and it cuts me off.
"One day I was ringing them from my house phone and mobile to see which one might get through first and it cut me off on both."
Ms Cater had a caesarean section when she had her youngest son 17 weeks ago and had started to notice her stomach increasing in size in April.
She said: "There was a mass or a lump.
"I kept phoning for a week to get an appointment and only got through once to be told they had none.
"I went down to the doctors' surgery to ask at the desk and was told they didn't have any appointments.
"I said I had a mass in my stomach and I was worried. I was told they would get a doctor to ring me.
"By midday when nobody had, I went to A&E. I found out I had an ovarian cyst and was referred to gynaecology.
"It turns out I now have a hernia and have to have surgery."
Ms Cater said she had also experienced problems when phoning the GP surgery to try and make appointments on behalf of her sons – one of whom has cerebral palsy.
She said: "I have had to take my son to A&E in the past because I couldn't get through to the surgery.
"I kept getting cut off all the time.
"I've tried for an hour and a half in the past to get through and just been cut off. It's disgusting."
In April, Nicky Wilde, deputy executive for primary care at Telford & Wrekin clinical commissioning group (CCG), told a meeting of Telford & Wrekin Council’s health and adult care scrutiny committee that the CCG was continuing to monitor the situation at Wellington Medical Practice.
She said there had been significant changes in management and staff.
At a meeting of the Telford & Wrekin CCG on Tuesday (6), partner at Wellington Medical Practice, Dr Derrick Ebenezer, told health chiefs there were issues retaining GPs at the Chapel Lane practice, but that a new advance nursing practitioner had been employed to ease the pressure on the doctors.
He said three salaried GPs had left due to the heavy workload and efforts were in hand to train the receptionists to signpost patients correctly to the right services if they did not need to see a GP.
"If we're looking at an ever decreasing pool of GPs we are going to shoot ourselves in the foot. There needs to be other ways of attracting the right staff with the experience resilience and we need help with that," Dr Ebenezer said.
The committee was told that problems with patients struggling to get phone appointments were improving after the surgery paid for five extra phone lines to take it up to 15 in total.
The CCG is due to install new broadband phone lines in all its doctors' surgeries after NHS England was successful in attracting funding for the scheme.
When the scheme is launched, Wellington will be the first medical centre to be receive the new voice over internet system.
