Dear LPG,  

Can you remember just a few years ago, before the pandemic, when we all had issues about waiting in the cold outside the doctor's surgery to make sure we got seen?  

There seem to be many unwritten rules these days, and one such rule is that nearly all companies and government agencies do their best to minimise verbal communication with their clients.    

I would like to document something that happened to me recently in the hope that it doesn’t ever happen to anyone else.  

As we get older it appears that many of us have little choice but to make more regular contact with our GPs.  All the little things that used to affect us, suddenly become much more serious issues, and I think that I am not the only ‘child’ of a parent in their nineties who would rather not take the chance of overlooking something that might be truly serious.  

This means that I find myself contacting the doctor frequently and even though it is expected that we get on line to make such contact, I am more comfortable making telephone calls. 

It is generally accepted that if you prefer to use the telephone, you have to be ready to make the call at exactly eight o’clock on a weekday morning and prepare for a fairly long wait before establishing contact.  Of course we are offered options; there is the instruction that you should use the online DIY approach, or opt to receive a text.  Then there is the option of them promising to call you back, but if you go with that one, then they are almost guaranteed to phone back the moment you are in the bathroom and have wet hands resulting in you missing their call.  I have it down to a science these days, because my mother is at a stage in life when what might be considered relatively small ailments seem to become major to her.   

I recently needed to do this and started to call at two minutes to eight.  After listening to all the recorded information three times, the message that informs that the surgery is closed was replaced with the information that I was ‘number one in the queue’.  I expected a bit of a wait even though I was at the front, but less than two minutes into the call it was diverted to the emergency call centre.  I listened to their recording telling me that ‘my call will be answered shortly’ but I was still listening 17 minutes later. I decided to use another phone and make the call again.  The original recording sequence started all over again, and I pressed the appropriate buttons, at which point I found myself listening to two different sets of music with interspersed recordings about how long I would need to wait.  

That did not last too long because, a few minutes later, the second call was answered by a real person and I got my mother’s health problem recorded.   Having done so I felt the need to tell the doctor’s receptionist about the flawed system that left me still listening to the so called ‘emergency’ service that continued to ring on the other phone.  I had hardly started the explanation when the phone line appeared to be cut off.  

Because of the timing of the disconnection, I made a comment to my mother who was listening. It implied that she had disconnected intentionally but my choice of words could have been better. Even though I was not best pleased, that would have been the end of it but within a minute the phone rang and the advisor informed me that she had heard what I said.   

Had there been no call back, I could have accepted that the phone call could have been genuinely disconnected at that point, but this advisor made the mistake of letting me know that she was still well and truly connected.  Questions have to be asked about how unintentional that disconnection was.  Anyone with a mobile phone will have heard of the mute button.  

It might be that she had had a bad day, but as an ex customer front-line worker, I know that a little diplomacy or at least the omission of the self-incriminating call-back would have been a better course of action on her part.  

We hear about how abused customer service workers are, but it is also the case that we consumers can feel equally abused at times.  When calling someone such as your GP, you don’t have the choice of who you can speak to, and while most receptionists are really helpful they, too, can behave unprofessionally.  I could have complained because that long initial recording states that all their calls are recorded, but I will leave it at that for the moment.  But it just goes to show that the systems, both human and electronic, can be truly flawed.  

RM, Lee