A DESPERATE mum told how she was forced to call her GP surgery a total of 178 times as she tried to make an appointment for her two sick children.

Hannah Murray, of Westcliff Parade, Westcliff, was worried about her daughter Heidi, 12, who appeared to have a chest infection, and two-year-old Mabel, who had been battling a cough for nine weeks.

The 39-year-old student spent more than four hours trying to speak to a receptionist at the Valkyrie Surgery, in Valkyrie Road, Westcliff.

She said: “Mabel’s cough has got progressively worse to the point where she is now being sick so I wanted to get her checked out.

“I tried to ring the doctors surgery as soon as they opened at 8 but couldn’t even get through. It was just sounding the engaged tone.

“Between 8am and 12.18pm I rang the surgery more than 100 times before I could even get put in a queue.

“I waited for nine minutes and then the call cut off. Eleven calls later, I got through and queued for another six minutes to speak to someone - and then got told there were no appointments left.”

The mother-of-four said it was only after she threatened to take her daughters to A&E that she given an appointment - for 3.30pm the same day.

In its most recent patient survey results, published in July this year, 64 per cent of people who responded said they found it was easy to get through to the Valkyrie Surgery by phone - below Southend Clinical Commissioning Group’s average of 71 per cent and the national average of 73 per cent.

The surgery, which serves almost 15,000 people, also scored below average when patients were asked if they found the receptionists helpful.

Ms Murray added: “This has happened several times in the last year. Usually I give up after 30 or 40 calls, but this time was just the last straw.

“By the time I got there, I’d had enough so just got on with it. It did look very busy and this is not an attack on any individual. It’s just sheer astonishment that a mother-of-four has to call 178 times to get an appointment. “I’ve actually found a lot of people have had similar experiences at surgeries in the area. They don’t allocate enough phone lines. To be solidly engaged for that length of time is just simply not good enough.”

Dr Marimuthu Velmurugan, also known as Dr Vel, who is based at the Valkyrie Surgery, believes the incident is a one-off.

He said: “There are plenty of doctors working very hard and this is a very good surgery. It is very busy because we take in a lot of patients from the surrounding area.

“It is very unfortunate for this to happen but the staff do their best. This surgery is one of the best places in the town.”