ST Forum Feb 24, 2006

CUSTOMER service is a two-way traffic. I refer to a clinic in Holland Road's vicinity which closes at midnight. Apparently, late patients were turned away and they complained.
 
Put yourself in the clinic assistants' shoes. If the patients come at the last minute and each patient takes 15-20 minutes from registration to dispensing and issuing receipts, the clinic's staff and doctor will go home very late every day. It is not as if patients suddenly became sick at midnight. More often, it's because Singaporeans like to put off doing things until the last minute.

One reader complained that her father was turned away at a clinic in Serangoon because its rules stipulate that only regular patients, and no new patients unless brought in by a regular, will be attended to on holidays.

From the clinic's view, opening the clinic on public holidays is a service to loyal patients of the doctor. They are loath to accept patients who see their competitor doctors but take advantage of their clinic's services only when their regular clinics are closed.

Another reader complained she was charged $80 for simple flu medicine. The doctor had prescribed Klacid MR, which is very expensive.

The patient can always tell the clinic that he cannot afford such branded, expensive medicine. A face-saving way is to pay the consultation fee and ask for a prescription to buy the drugs at a pharmacy instead.

There are doctors who charge a premium for using branded, expensive drugs and not generics, so the mark-up and consultation fees go up stratospherically.

The message is: If you want good, strong medicine to cure you at one go without having to go back two or three times to the doctor, be prepared to pay for premium drugs.

The range of fees for simple flu medicines can be from $17 in a common HDB clinic to $80 in 'high-class' GP outfits. It always pays to ask first. It's like this: You can have your hair cut at $8 by the neighbourhood's Indian barber or pay $100 at a high brow hair saloon.

Lim Boon Hee

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