As we said in this previous post, learning of one or our reader’s experience – that a GP who he’d been using for 5 or 6 years, and thought was quite good, had referred him to a specialist who was easily the worst doctor he’d ever seen – has caused us to have a complete rethink of the role of GPs in our system. But we’ve certainly come to two quite definite conclusions already.
Firstly, if you use a specialist without carrying out your own research, you are stark raving mad!
At the very least, send them one email about something, (f they don’t have an ordinary email address, or, at least an email form, don’t bother with them,) as their response or otherwise will go some way to indicating whether they are helpful, upfront and honest, and into communication. If our reader had done just this one thing, he would never have used the specialist he’d been referred to, as, as he subsequently learnt, he had probably never responded to an email, from a patient, or anyone else, in his whole life.
Secondly, if ever you use a GP again who has referred you to a bad guy, you are stark raving mad!
In relation to the latter, we have become intrigued by the fact that, in reading hundreds and hundreds of ratings/reviews on GPs, we’ve never seen one along the lines of – “They were good themselves, but they referred me to a specialist who was really bad!”
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