I just wanted to report a new and particularly disgraceful entry for the Hall of Shame in the shape of the Out of Hours medical emergency number for Leaders In Oncology Care of Harley Street, otherwise known as The LOC.
My mother has been receiving exceeding financially profitable (for the owners of this establishment who prefer to go under the UK codename of HCA Healthcare Group whilst not seeming to like to draw to attention to the fact that this in fact stands for HospitalCare of America) treatment for nearly three years now but sadly the cancer she is suffering from has now reached an acute, and seemingly life threatening stage so only recently have I had to turn to a credit card sized plastic card containing an out of hours emergency contact number to obtain medical advice and possibly also arrange emergency hospital admission.
You can naturally therefore imagine my alarm and dismay on finding that this card actually contains the out of hours emergency number of
0845 458 0097 and when I instead first tried calling
0345 458 0097 (which as we know has been pre-reserved for LOC/HCA to switch over to) unfortunately found that number was unobtainable.
Fortunately I did have access to a Post Office Homephone line that gives free calls to 0845 nunbers at the weekend and so used this line to call the 0845 number (in order to avoid no doubt massive per minute charges with Virgin Mobile that would also fall outside my 2,500 minutes per month bundle to 01/02/03 and 075 to 079 UK mobile numbers).
The line in fact turns out to go through to a call centre in Newfoundland, Canada manned by some of the most emotion lacking North Americans you have ever encountered (this possibly seems in some way correlated with being located in a remote often heavily frozen wilderness area) who say that the choice of an 0845 number is nothing at all to do with them (passing the blame squarely back at their client - LOC/HCA). They did however say that if I called the closed LOC switchboard number on 020 7317 2500 there was an option there to reach their call centre although it might be slower and more complicated to use.
Obviously I also consulted saynoto0870.com's geographic alternatives phone number directory and so was very disappointed indeed to find no alternative to 0845 458 0097 listed. Although I have now remedied that error by creating a new listing for LOC - Leaders In Oncology Care (but I note that a search for LOC alone does not however work properly due to strange limitations in searching short name strings on this website, where it is not possible to only match the first three characters in the string being searched) the fact remains that it is extraordinarily annoying that Hospitalcare of America apparently has so little regard for its UK Harley Street patients and/or relatives welfare (in an emergency) that it is happy to see their mobile phone bills rooked with charges of £1 per minute or more if people call the 0845 number (as they are very likely to do in the emotional panic of either they or a relative being very seriously unwell).
In the circumstances I think it is utterly despicable that Hospitalcare of America has so little regard for its patients and their welfare and/or that they seem to feel so immune from complying with pesky local UK regulations (rather in the manner of say Uber) that they have still not managed to complete the easy task of switching this line to its 03 equivalent. I also have a few other issues with Hospitalcare of America in terms of repeatedly and seemingly unjustifiably over optimistic projections of the likely medical outcome of my mother's cancer treatment with them but those will have to wait for resolution in various other venues.
For now I will confine my efforts here to the matter of the disgraceful continued misuse by LOC and HCA Healthcare Group of the 0845 number, clearly indicating further systemic Compliance failings within the HCA Healthcare Group Operation.
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Hall of Fame (including Hall of Shame) (Read 552,770 times)
