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Care Opinion

Outpatients lack of notification of patient's appointment

Posted By aquariusht77

"Outpatients lack of notification of patient's appointment"

About: Hedland Health Campus / Outpatients

(as the patient),

I recently received a letter in the mail informing me that I had a Physician appointment two days prior to receiving the letter. The letter stated that I needed to confirm my attendance 1 week prior to the appointment and if I failed to confirm it would result in me being removed from the clinic and needing a new referral from the GP.  I have regular treatment in outpatients and appointments with the General Physician. I had not been contacted via either a phone call or SMS prior to this appointment.

When I contacted Outpatients to notify them that I had only received the letter after work two days after the scheduled appointment date, I was informed that in this circumstance they will reschedule an appointment for me and exclude me having to get another referral from the GP at this time.  There was no acknowledgement or apology from Outpatients that there was an issue from their part on me missing my scheduled appointment. In my opinion, I was made to feel that it was my fault, not theirs.

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Responses

Response from Rhiannon Hosking, A/Operations Manager, West Pilbara, WA Country Health Service, Pilbara 3 years ago
We are preparing to make a change
Rhiannon Hosking
A/Operations Manager, West Pilbara,
WA Country Health Service, Pilbara

Submitted on 30/11/2020 at 1:52 PM
Published on Care Opinion on 1/12/2020 at 9:56 AM

picture of Rhiannon Hosking

Dear aquariusht77,

I would like to take the time to acknowledge your recent experience and thank you for your feedback. I am very sorry to hear of your recent interactions with the Outpatients clinic at Hedland Health Campus.

It is disappointing to hear that our systems have failed in this instance, and that you were not notified about your appointment until after the fact. I am also sorry to hear that on contacting our service that you did not receive an apology for this error, and were made to feel as though it were your fault. This does not align with our WA Country Health Service values, or our intent to always put our patients first.

We are already in the process of undertaking a review of the administration systems that support our Outpatients appointments to determine as soon as possible where the gaps are and how such an error could come to pass, to ensure that this does not occur for patients in the future.

I will also be sharing your experience with the team in Outpatients to highlight the importance of courtesy and compassion in the way we communicate with our patients.

Thanks again for taking the time to tell us about your experience and for giving us the opportunity to improve our services. It is important to us that we are delivering quality care to our community and we take feedback very seriously.

If you would like to discuss this further please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on 9174 1040; my name is Rhiannon Hosking and I am the Acting Operations Manager at Hedland Health Campus.

Kind regards,

Rhiannon Hosking

A/Operations Manager

WA Country Health Service - East Pilbara

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