Firstly, if I could give Dr. Hardee 5-stars, I absolutely would. I came in to see her earlier this year with a problem that has been ongoing and quite bothersome. She was kind and caring in listening to my concerns and very open with all of my options for treatment. She made sure that I knew what my options were and the details of each option so that I, as the patient, could make an informed decision about my health. She has never been pushy with treatment options, or judgmental about my concerns in anyway. I ended up trying different medications that ultimately were not for me and proceeded with a surgical option. She was absolutely fantastic with the entire process and my recovery from surgery was a breeze. The only downside to seeing her is that she is very busy, and sometimes runs pretty behind. This is a common occurrence with many good physicians in clinics, and is something that I generally don't have an issue with. I understand that there are many different things that can impact the flow of a clinical schedule; if one patient needs more time to discuss their problem than the schedule allows for, things can get very behind very quickly. But, I do prefer a doctor who will take the time at my visit to ensure that I have my questions answered and a clear plan of action moving forward and Dr. Hardee does just that.
Now, the reason for the 3-star review has everything to do with the practice itself. As someone who has worked in healthcare for nearly a decade, I am very unimpressed with nursing staff. I have called the office to speak with a nurse and ask some pretty simple questions, or clarify some concerns and each time I have called, I have spoken to the absolute least cheerful, least helpful nurse. I consider myself a pretty well educated patient and so perhaps my questions exceed the scope of the nurses knowledge, which is absolutely fine. But, when this situation occurs, it is the role of the nurse to find the answers, or at least pretend like you care enough to put forth some sort of effort to help your patient. If this is the specialty you work in and these are the services provided, you are doing your patients and yourself a disservice by not educated yourself on at least the basics of the different services/procedures your clinic provides. If you're burnt out and you don't have the patience to have a kind and caring conversation with any patient about any pertinent concern they may have, then you have absolutely no business being a nurse. If a patient calls on a Friday afternoon with a question or concern, especially if they are post-op, the answer to the question should never be, "It's too complicated you need to come in," followed by an inability to schedule the appointment and being transferred to a 20 minute hold to schedule an appointment. (I get that scheduling isn't what you went to school for but, being versatile in your role and accommodating your patients saves everyone time.) If the question is, "is this normal with this specific part of the procedure," the answer can be given as a yes, no, or I'm not really sure, let me check on that and get back to you. The only scenario in which this should necessitate an office visit is if I'm in pain, fever, bleeding, drainage/redness/swelling/warmth at the incision sight, or if something needs to be examined physically or if this conversation were to be long and require face to face communication to help facilitate the understanding between the patient and clinician. But, a simple yes or no would have more than sufficed in this instance. If I can spend 30 minutes on google and find the information necessary to develop an answer to my question, then so can you.
The other issue that I have with this practice, which I mentioned briefly above, is the scheduling. It takes forever. Each time I have called to schedule an appointment, I'm on hold for no less than 15 minutes and they close the phones at lunch time, which is understandable but, still unfortunate for those of us who have the same hours as the rest of the people who work. If you're going to close the phones for lunch, then hire more people to answer them during regular business hours and if you don't want to hire more people, don't close the phones at lunch - schedule people's lunches at different times so that someone is always available to schedule appointments.
To wrap this up, Dr. Hardee is awesome, the phone nurse couldn't be more useless, and scheduling is a drag. I plan on having a list of questions to be answered at my visits and schedule any appointments when I'm at the clinic to avoid any further frustrations that would push me to find a new practice. read more