Caron's Musings has a post about her trauma trying to get an appointment with a GP.
I echo her experiences but another aspect of GP surgeries is the delivery of test results.
Our local surgery has a dedicated test results phone line - well menu option of the main line (which sounds like a sensible user-friendly thing) but it is only open between 2pm and 4pm Monday-Friday and this is the only way to get your results short of booking a GP appointment (see above!).
Recently I had cause to ask them whether someone who couldn't ring between between 2pm-4pm as they couldn't get away from work (this was on the Friday and they didn't want to wait over the weekend) could maybe come into the surgery at 4:30pm and pick up their results instead. Eventually when I got through on the forth attempt (ring number, choose menu option, listen to ringing phone, eventually get message saying they are busy) they said no and that ringing between 2-4pm on a weekday was the only way to get results.
I know this may be a minor niggle but it's just another inconvenience put up when you're trying to deal with your local GP surgery and it could cause someone significant distress. Also this combined with difficulties and delays in getting appointments means that something that, to my mind, should take about a week (appointment, test, results, appointment) ends up taking a month with all the inherent stress.
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Our surgery is exactly the same except it's between 3 and 5. However, if there is something that needs attention, to give them their due, they will phone. My GP upped my medication for something recently on the basis of test results and I got a phone call to tell me - and it wasn't a major thing in the scheme of things.
In my experience, most surgeries will tell you fairly immediately if test results indicate something bad. At least that should take the stress out of waiting for results, if that makes any sense.
Just try doing all this if you are deaf... even with TYPETALK it is a pain in the fundamentals.
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