Excluding Patients

[BarrySimpson]

Recently, both my medical practitioners' surgery and care agency (I am paralysed and need carers 3 times per day) have closed their e-mail access for patients. This is important to me because my paralysis makes it very difficult for me to hold he phone for long periods while waiting in the long telephone queues. In any case, telephone contacts are often ignored or fobbed off with deception. Is this happening elsewhere?

[incon1982 Administrator]

I know that here in the US most of my physicians want you to email them through a portal system, and it's usually their physician assistants or their nurses that respond for them. This has been pretty much forced on us during the pandemic, and it seems that's the way all the physicians are handling things - and not through phone calls.

When I was caring for my late husband just two years ago, he could no longer type and so I either had to type for him, or I would leave a phone message and hope that someone would get back to me. (He had become completely paralyzed from his neck down dueto his neurological disease - Multiple System Atrophy).

Physicians need to leave multiple ways for people to communicate with them!!