So if voice mail isn’t working—that’s it? No need to do anything else? Don’t you folks have patients’ emails or a primary and secondary number to call? I recognize that doctors don’t have all day to respond to phone calls and emails but don’t you have admin people who can screen calls and call back/email a patient to let him/her know you heard the concern.
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Aren’t these calls handled by an answering service? Not part of the doctor team?
My suggestion…if you don’t hear within an hour, call back. And tell the service you haven’t heard back.
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In my H’s case the surgeon’s number wasn’t picked up by an answering service—it went to his NP’s voice mail. It had the usual message—if this is a life threatening emergency call 911. Also said—she would respond on the same day to all calls made between 10am and 4pm. H did call between those times and left a message and sent email through the communication portal setup by this hospital system. No response. His PT was the one who was worried and she left several messages too. Given that the PT left a message too. She’s someone who sees lots of folks post knee replacement surgery—why wouldn’t someone in the surgeon’s office suspect there was an issue and respond. It was only H’s PCP’s office who suggested he come in and have the knee checked.
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So when you call and leave a message for someone it is expected that you would answer if you were called back, and make sure that you accept unlisted phone calls. Remember doctors are not reimbursed for this and as someone noted above are often doing it on their off time in addition to seeing patients in the office, operating, paperwork, etc, etc, etc.
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Yes, when we call a MD, my eyes and ears are glued to the phone for the number I left. I have accidentally had it on wrong setting once and was able to interrupt message the md was leaving and speak to him.
The surgeon who ignored your H’s attempts to contact him is lucky the PCP picked up on the problem, no thanks to the surgeon ignoring it.
@Bromfield2 my sympathy, that sounds so frustrating.
Sounds like the NP really dropped the ball, I’m not sure but it could be that the surgeon has no idea this 
is going on.
This is a bit of inside baseball and people may not believe me and I don’t really care.
But there are sometimes problems between the physicians and the office staff. When a practice is not owned by them, the physician can have no control over the staff hired. Or not hired. There are terrible employees that the actual physician has no recourse for.
We had this issue with a surgeon. He was great, the operation was a success. The office staff was the worst I have ever experienced. Truly awful. I found out that the doctors did not have any say in the staff hired. I suspect they were as frustrated as we were.
Every one of the surgeons in that group left shortly thereafter. Hopefully they had a say in or had better staff.
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Yes—we waited for a call and checked phones and the patient/doctor communication portal. Nothing from the surgeon’s office. No email or phone call—we kept monitoring.
My doctor would never return my call, LOL. After hours or weekends, if I call you get a messenger service that says to just go to the ER or Urgent Care if it’s timely and to call back on a weekday to make an appointment if it’s not. On weekdays the process to get an appointment goes like this:
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Call and get an automated system that you can’t shortcut even if you have the # your going to have to hit memorized.
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Wait on hold for a human. Human eventually asks you a bunch of questions (name birthday, primary doctor, etc.) before saying they need to transfer you to someone else.
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Wait on hold again.
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Get the next person who asks all the same questions then says they need to leave a message for the doctor’s nurse who will call you back. They absolutely will not schedule even a regular appointment until the nurse speaks to you.
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Wait for the nurse to call. This can take up to 1.5 days in my experience. If you get unlucky and don’t happen to be able to take the call when the nurse finally rings, you’re SOL and go back to step #1 and start all over again. If you do take it (and I have jumped off a video meeting with my boss to avoid the rinse and repeat above) the nurse will basically try and talk you into going to the ER instead and if you hold your ground you will finally be allowed to make an appointment, usually at least two weeks out.
It’s a large practice, and one of the benefits is supposed to be to see other doctors if yours isn’t available. But to do so, you have to go through all the steps above only to then have the first nurse leave a message for the alternative doctor’s receptionist who then will call you and take info before leaving a message with the second nurse who you then have to wait for a call from. That nurse will also try and talk you into going to an ER or Urgent care and if you hold your ground, you’ll finally get an appointment.
They didn’t used to require the nurse step but it seems like they added it a couple years ago to try and discourage people from making appointments. I’m guessing they have signed up too many patients so all the hoops seem to be their way of culling the herd and only seeing those who were most desperate to be seen who persevered through the process.
And there’s no way to leave a message to directly reach the doctor. If you ask, they will say you must make an appointment and ask in person.
And this is my third doctor in the area. The previous two were even worse – their offices would either cancel your appointment, repeatedly, at the last minute or even worse let you show up at the office then tell you after waiting an hour that the appointment is canceled.
All this is the supposed premium service we get for not having public healthcare in this country…
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Here are some reasons that I couldn’t get back in touch with the patient:
Wrong number given. No answer. Pt’s phone would not accept calls from an anonymous number (often, the MD doesn’t want the patient to have his cell number), despite the service having told the patient to set their phone to accept blocked number calls, and how to do that. Call went straight to voicemail, and voicemail couldn’t accept a message. Call was something that can and should be taken care of during business hours, like cancelling and/or rescheduling an appointment, didn’t require the MD. Sometimes, when covering a very large group practice during extremely busy sick season, despite working as fast as one could, it literally could take several hours before there was time to return a call. Sometimes, if call came in while in the midst of hospital rounds, one couldn’t return calls until after finishing rounds.
Everyone involved in medical care is human. The service could make a mistake. The doctor could misread/misdial a digit. If a patient really needs to speak with the doctor outside of office hours for an urgent matter that cannot wait until morning, and they don’t get a call back in a timely fashion, they should try again. And if if is so urgent that they cannot wait for a call back, the patient needs to make a judgement call about whether it’s an urgent enough matter that they need to seek care emergently, in person.
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I see doctors are in the service business. They can choose how they treat their patients, but we can also switch if we don’t like the service they are giving. I live in NYC and I probably have more options than other people.
I am not thrilled with my current internist now because he does not give me an opinion when I ask for it. e.g. when I had Covid he said he could prescribe Paxlovid i i wanted it, and when I asked him if I should take it he wouldn’t give me his opinion. I had to make a decision not to take it after I did some googling.
This only works if there’s decent competition. I live in a pretty well off and populated suburb (Princeton area) and have in the last 20 years found no primary care practice that doesn’t go to lengths to try and make it hard to see a doctor and impossible to communicate with them outside of the difficult-to-get appointments. So far I’m zero for 3. Been with the third the longest. Used to be good, but every year they make it harder and harder to see the doctor, just like the others before them. It’s like domestic airlines. You can complain as a consumer, but good luck finding one that is much better or if so stays that way once they get absorbed in the mega-practices.
Time to try practice number four?
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The problem to me is that primary care practices are not owned by the physicians but by a large corporation (hospital) system that has certain practices. Their bottom line is making money, and they are the one dictating these hard to schedule appointments.
Very few physicians own their own practices anymore, they are employees also. They don’t like the hoops you have to jump through. They just want to practice medicine. They went through years and years of schooling, have tremendous debt to pay off and are trying to practice medicine as well as they can.
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Got any suggestions? When I’ve asked around locally, almost everyone says the practice I have now – they seem to have gradually consolidated much of the local market. They now have over 30 doctors according to their website. This is a trend – small practices are more and more rare. And large ones seem like factories that do as much as possible to distance the patients from the providers.
My husband’s physician and his partners refused to sell out so he is very fortunate. I went to another local practice and she did sell out and , like noted above, she had horrible office staff that she had no hiring/firing control over.
I left that practice when my doctor moved out of state and now see a woman in a Northwestern Univ affiliated practice- she is excellent but I’m concerned she may go concierge as several other doctors in her practice have gone.
So frustrating to not get returned phone calls but I also can see how doctors are up against people with full mailboxes, not picking up calls, etc.
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Maybe seek out a concierge practice, if there are any in the area?
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Good—glad you respond. If you care to answer—what is your specialty?
We are not bought by a large group. We keep saying no. Advantage is we call patients right back. We give personal care and take time talking to patients…
But I once had someone with an"emergency"… Back in the day I actually went to her house. She wasn’t home. She was getting her hair done 
… People perception of emergency is different nt then mine. If it’s that urgent hospitals are open all day /night. 99.9%of the reasons patients call can wait till regular business hours medically.
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Not sure if your asking me but Podiatric Surgical and sports medicine injury practice.