Village Health Medical Centre

Can’t recommend this practice enough!nMy son and I switched from another practice about 18months ago. Whether it’s seeing our normal gp, through their acute/infectious clinic or the nurses, everyone has been thorough and kind and have always left satisfied with the level of care they have provided.

I was supporting a patient yesterday in Villege Health to book an appointment for her with her gp as she didn’t know English.As soon as I said to the young receptionist that there are a couple of things she needs to talk to you about today, and that she needs an appt, the receptionist said that the patient can only discuss one issue with her gp in a single appt!! That was so weird to hear, as I didn’t say she needs to discuss a couple of thing with “gp”;even if I was saying that, that is not a receptionist business to decide how much a patient can say in a 15 min appt. They can discuss anything with their gp as long as it fits in that 15 min time frame. I have been accompanying many patients during their appts with GPs and not a single one of the gps has set such a rule.the only thing was that you need to finish withn that 15 min time frame.nWhen I assured the receptionist that a 15 min appt is enough for her, she made another story by asking her why she needs the appt? Seriously! I’ve never experienced such a thing before.Poor lady started explaining that her whole body is sore, also mentioning experiencing pain in chest and tommy sometimes.Receptionist talked to a nurse and then said she cannot book her in for an appt as it is an acute care and she needs to go to 24 hour surgery or hospital eventhough the patient explained she doesn’t have chest pain now and she just meant sometimes.Receptionist still insisted that she cannot book her an appt.The patient asked her to please book me in for an appt and I will sure go to hospital if I feel pain in chest.She said she cannot!!! even though she was aware that the patient also needed to ask gp to fill in disability allowance form for her. I couldn’t believe my eyes that poor lady was being rejected to have a simple gp appt eventhough she was absolutely fine in terms of her overal health and really nothing emergency AT ALL.The patient was feeling so dissapointed and frustrated and later on told me she has always had issues with this practice and has not been happy with their service at all and asked me to register her elsewhere.nI’m giving this rating as the result of the awful experience we had yesterday with that receptionist and unfortunately I don’t know her name and I personally don’t want to generalise it to all staff and practice.

The GPs themselves are fine if you can manage to get in to see them, but the practice is passive aggressively hostile toward patients, and isn’t able to reliably deliver even the most basic levels of service that you’d expect from your primary healthcare provider. I’d recommend looking elsewhere.nnRegarding the hostility, just call them and listen to the messages in their automated phone system. Or go there and look at the signs in their lobby. These things only serve to increase the stress one experiences related to seeking care through their practice.nnRegarding the signs, they have several big bold signs advising of their “zero tolerance” policy for rudeness toward their staff, making you feel as though you’ll be told off and kicked out if you have any sort of complaint. Surely anyone who is impulsive enough to abuse staff will be put off by those, and that wouldn’t stop more anxious people from advocating for themselves, right?nnThen there’s the one advising that they may deny you service and charge you a fine you if you check in for your appointment more than 5 minutes late. I can’t recall a time when they offered to pay me when they were running late nearly all of my appointments with them.nnPassive hostility is one thing, but what about the service itself? They’re hard pressed for appointment availability, so they’re doing everything in their power to steer patients toward lower touch, or self-service options. That would be fine if they could service those adequately, but they seem to be dropping the ball there as well.nnFor example, this week I requested a repeat prescription on Tuesday afternoon, for a medication that I’m not meant to stop suddenly. I put through the request online, and I selected the 48h turn-around time, as I had 3 days’ supply left. On Thursday afternoon, after the 48h had transpired, the prescription hadn’t been sent to the pharmacy. I called them to follow up on it. The receptionist assured me that it would go through before the end of the day. It didn’t.nnI called again on Friday today, and explained that I had now ran out of this medication, and that this was problematic due to the need to not stop taking it suddenly. The receptionist told me that the doctor was quite busy today. I explained again that I will have issues if I can’t get it filled today, and asked the receptionist if she could do anything to prioritise it so it could be sent through this afternoon, as my pharmacy isn’t open on the weekend. She said she’d tell the doctor, but that’s all that she can do.nnAt 4:15 it still hadn’t been sent through, so I tried calling them again. They’d closed for the day at 4pm, and now I’m going to have a terrible weekend dealing with completely avoidable complications that result from suddenly stopping this medication. It’s my anniversary this weekend, too.nnIt would be forgivable if this was a one-off, but they have been increasingly unreliable over the years that I’ve been going there. With how hard they make it to get treatment, and with their weird, passively hostile attitude toward patients, you should not expect that you can rely on this practice to meet your needs, especially if you have any sort of ongoing health issues that require regular attention from your medical provider.

Had no issue with booking appointments, all the staff I have seen over the past few visits have been friendly, informative and efficient. Appreciate the hard work from everyone.

Very bad experience. We have been enrolled with Village health for over 8 years. Everytime, we book an appointment, we generally wait there for like 15-20 mins and sometimes even for longer but we have never complained about it. But recently, we booked an appointment and due to some emergency situation, we were running only 10 mins late for the appointment and we rang reception in adavance while we were driving to the medical centre. But we were told that we will have to cancel our appointment and we were not allowed to come 10 mins late. On top of that we were sent an invoice of $30 as cancelled appointment fee. We had to turn back halfway only because of being 10 minutes late. Have we ever declined to pay the full amount when we wait every time for 20 mins before the doctor actually sees us. Highly dissatisfied and disappointed. Going to cancel our enrolment with you guys.

Directions to Village Health Medical Centre with public transportation

---