Appointment woe

I feel that I must reply to Bob Hind's letter (Loss of Face, December 6) where he touches on the current situation regarding doctors’ surgeries. We find today that most, if not all, of us start to loss the will to live should we need help or advice from a doctor.

To start with, we have the telephone menu to contend with, for example ‘push one for this, push two for that,’ and so on. And should you be successful in navigating this extremely frustrating piece of software, the very next stumbling block is the surgery receptionist. Oh my, if you have not thought of replacing the telephone on its stand by now, you very soon will do.

The surgery receptionist stands at the end of every telephone call to your surgery, it is her daily regime to put a stop to any potential patient regardless of whether your problem may be small or of a more serious nature, a brick wall will be much easier to overcome.

Should you be successful in obtaining a doctor’s appointment then you really should go on and buy a lottery ticket.

But for now, when you check the surgery car park, particularly the doctor’s parked vehicles and notice that they have arrived in anything from a Porsche to a Range Rover. And then you discover that a doctor’s salary ranges from £65,000 to £85,000, which is for the number of registered patients they have on their books, and not the number of patients that a doctor gets to see in a day, the life of an NHS doctor today must be extremely difficult and challenging.

Martin Clark Lashly Meadow, Hambledon