It is getting very difficult Jen. And quite worrying. Where I live there seem to be an inordinate amount of disabled and / or very elderly people. Seeing 'em queuing for appointments, along with people with babies and small children on cold winter days well before 8am, in order to grab an appointment was a wake up call for me.
Phone triage done by receptionists drives me clean round the bend. And if you actually go in to ask for an appointment, that means you have to let everyone know about your haemorrhaging piles, if that’s what the problem is.
Generally, if I have felt it necessary to see my actual doctor rather than a nurse or nurse-practitioner or whatever, I have been able to do so simply by asking. If I think it’s something an RN can handle, I am happy to see an RN: I understand that the doctor’s time is a limited resource.
One problem, though, is the VERY uneven abilities of the nurses/ practitioners/ doctors’ assistants. Some of them are very conscientious and knowledgable, but others are true dimwits. I assume they have SOME sort of certificate from somewhere indicating that they are capable, but such certificates tell a lie. So often these days, in medicine and elsewhere, a diploma or professional certificate means only that the holder has wangled his or her way into a series of utterly pointless “classes” and workshops, and nothing more than that. In education, the field from which I am retired, the situation is spectacularly bad: the coursework has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the actual art of actually teaching actual students.
Enough of the rant: I can accept that we need not always see the doc, but I do wish we could rely on seeing a competent person when we do not.
As for incompetent doctors, it’s another topic, one too dark for such a charming sunny day as this.
Sort of worse in a way Sybil the phone triage at my surgery is done by the GP’s. You ring up and persuade the receptionist you need to talk to a doctor. Having spent the better part of 15 minutes holding in a queue, by then I’m usually quite assertive. And then you’re told you’ll get a call back within 2 hours and then you get to talk on the phone to a doctor. It seems the purpose of that call back is to make sure you don’t get an appointment for that day either or indeed ever. Instead get palmed off so you have to do the whole thing again the next morning. With my pelvic fractures that went on for 2 whole weeks.