Let me start off by saying Dr. Burch is a great doctor. He is knowledgeable, informative, and honest. If you can stomach the way the health industry is currently, then by all means go to him as your dr.
However, in my 27 yrs of hospital care (and I've practically lived in them as a very accident prone person), I've never been treated more poorly by a hospital staff. In general, the nurses who work under him are anything but cheerful and happy to be there. You'll be lucky to see one smile. And the wait times on both appts were well over 2 hrs each... Very ridiculous. But in particular, 5 days after my surgery, I woke up one morning to such an excruciating pain. I had just run out of pain medications and luckily had my wife's old Percocet pills. The pain wouldn't stop and I was in tears, biting my pillow to try and deal with it. I called WKONA and listened through 5 different submenus to get a line to Burch's staff to "ask a question" (according to the submenu choice). I was rudely received by his receptionist. I began describing my situation, fighting back tears and obviously distressed. She responded coldly, "I need your name first." I gave her my information, and she proceeds to tell me off saying next time I should listen to all the menu options before selecting and that I needed to talk to the Medication line to ask for a new script, "but I'll transfer you over this time." Thanks lady.
Once I was transferred, I heard a machine request 10 different pieces of information in order to order more pain medication. I hung up... I wanted to talk to my doctor or a nurse who could help, not endless machines. So my wife called back the receptionist hoping to gain some sympathy and ground. None was found.... The woman was equally rude to my wife, not providing clear answers to questions as simple as "how often do they check the machine for submitted script requests?" if it weren't for the saving grace that we personally knew a nurse who does pre-op there, we would have had to suck it up, but we got an early afternoon appt with the doctor through her.
In that appointment, I explained the morning situation to him, of the unprofessionalism and lack of sympathy. His response was not apologetic, but more like "yeah that'll happen."
To make the situation worse, the reason I had so much pain was because the bandages were tight and my foot began to swell. All that needed to happen was to take the boot off, loosen the wrappings and put ice on it, but we were told after surgery to never take the boot off for the first week, so my foot needed to swell and had no room to do so, so every square inch was being forced into a small space. No wonder I hurt so bad. Not only did this staff set me up for this pain through misinformation, but they were virtually unresponsive when I needed them most. The ONLY reason this has 2 stars is because the surgical work was very good.
by Joshua S.
xxx.xxx.83.140
March 26, 2012
