We are in the early stages of assisting one of our readers in making a complaint to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission about a certain doctor, and a lot of it turns on whether he received a certain important email or not.
And it’s gradually dawned on us how SO stupid and naive we’ve been in not realising that, if a doctor hasn’t replied to an email, then, they are ALWAYS going to deny that they received it. In other words, if you’ve sent an email to a doctor, and they haven’t replied to it within a reasonable time, say 10 or 15 days, it’s ALWAYS going to be pointless for you to complain, because they are ALWAYS going to deny that they received it, and you are NEVER going to be able to prove otherwise.
Who’s ever heard of a doctor saying, “Yes I received that email and I should have replied!!!”
(Not all doctors bother to embellish things with the bit that the Urologist, Dr Andrew Brooks, adds – that he doesn’t receive them because his email address is set up so that it “weeds out” emails sent to him by patients, so that he doesn’t receive them. They just deny that they received them, full stop.)
And it doesn’t matter which email address has been used. The email address used in emailing the doctor concerned was his email address on the prestigious University Of Sydney’s School of Medicine’s website, but this didn’t stop him claiming that it had failed to work, and in fact hadn’t been working for more than two and a half years.
Of course, its’ easy in hindsight. If you’ve sent an email to a doctor you’ve been using and it hasn’t even been acknowledged after 10 or 15 days, the bad news is that you’ve probably been dealing with a crook who you probably should have avoided like the plague.