Is it buildings that matter – 0r patient care?
For many months The Cranleigh Medical Practice has been a bit like a punchbag for its patients.
Some of the comments made on the local Facebook Groups, are serious and have resulted in life-changing consequences however, we will not repeat those incidents here. Suffice to say that some of its 17,000 patients of the practice, housed in a very impressive £7m modern building in Village Way, are not impressed with the current service they are receiving.
However, this is not confined to Cranleigh GP’s, and not getting face-to-face appointments is having catastrophic consequences all over ‘Your Waverley’ and the country. So Cranleigh is not alone.
Here are just two typical comments:
The system they have in place is awful. Pre pandemic I had not a bad word to say about them, but now it’s horrendous! Fully appreciate the need to do online consultation and personally find in many instances it’s better. But needed to speak to someone twice last week for two of my kids, and the system doesn’t work at all!
people are not criticising individuals – just the system, for an elderly person it’s nigh on impossible. In many cases you have to do a self-diagnosis and it is a tendency for people to either underplay or overplay symptoms and without a face to face examination mistakes can easily be made. Some surgeries (with extra precautionary measures) have managed to facilitate a fairly normal practice.I dread to think what the fall out of non-diagnosed medical conditions is going to be.- probably make the country’s Covid death figures seem like a drop in the ocean and they won’t just be mainly elderly either.
We cannot understand the claim that Cranleigh’s patients are being sent as far away as Shere and Godalming? Surely this must be wrong?
In a statement, the practice maintains it has problems with recruiting staff. However, from correspondence sent to us, staff leave the group regularly due to their dissatisfaction. Some of whom have joined neighbouring practices.
Here’s the GP’s statement – written in the first person but not signed by a member of staff.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy at Cranleigh Medical Practice – quite the opposite in fact.
Last year, a letter that NHS England sent to GPs asked them to make face-to-face appointments available during the Coronavirus pandemic. NHS England was forced to apologise after GPs called the letter “erroneous and offensive” and claimed that it caused a “media onslaught” for suggesting that GPs were shirking their responsibilities to their patients.
WW. According to some of our eastern village followers, it is almost impossible to get through to the Cranleigh Practice. However, this may have been happening elsewhere – here, in Godalming or Farnham, but we have not received any complaints. We would like to hear from anyone there who has experienced similar problems.
There is also now an online petition calling for an Urgent Treatment Centre to be operated from the old Village Hospital in Cranleigh High Street. This has been launched by Andy Webb (nothing to do with the Waverley Web) on the Cranleigh Community Board. This will be the subject of a future post.
Here’s the link: :https://www.facebook.com/groups/590560504690466/permalink/1208904346189409/#