Dominick Peluso

Review of Acton Medical Assoc

I have been going here for a few years now I think...

I have been going here for a few years now I think it's really gone down hill. While the doctors and NPs I've seen have always been excellent, friendly, and I've never felt rushed, the entire experience around the visit seems to have declined rapidly over the past year or so.

An example: I recently rolled my ankle pretty bad on a Saturday. I knew the office was closed on the weekend and whenever I've sent a message on the patient portal, they ask me to call back business hours to make an appointment. I waited until Monday (Columbus day) to call to make an appointment. I was told to call back the next day. Tuesday morning I call and they have "more than 10 people in line ahead of you" to speak to a nurse/make an appointment. I'm directed to leave a voicemail, which I do. Days go by and they don't get back to me. I try calling back another time but again there's a huge wait. I ended up just going to CVS to get checked out. Friday, I finally get a call back from a nurse and she asks me to come in right away.

They are completely overloaded in adult medicine. They've reduced their own capacity, limiting the number of people for intake, increasing the amount of time for each appointment, and pushing more people to call in. They can't keep up with the calls so you're just completely out of luck if you need to talk to someone or want to make an appointment. It's not a stretch to wait an hour or two on the phone. If you're lucky enough to get ahold of someone quickly, there's about a 50% chance they are terse and rude to you over the phone. I've been going to CVS so much lately because it's so much easier to make an appointment. I'm not saying CVS is great or anything, in fact I think it's pretty sad that I have to go elsewhere to get medical care outside of my own primary care provider.

Lastly, this is a new thing but it's worth mentioning. At my appointment today, they prompted me for a new mask policy at the office. The policy is that you have to take a mask they give you and either replace your mask with theirs, or put their mask over your mask. So the intake person, takes a mask out of a box (pinching the inside and outside with her fingers) and then puts it in my hand, which just touched the lobby door handle of a doctor's office. I then have to exit out the lobby doors, touching them again, take off a brand new KN95 mask, which I put on in my car, and replace it with a generic non-sealing surgical mask which has been touched by 2 unclean hands. I'm sure there's good intentions behind this policy but I felt like after I was forced to swap masks, I was more exposed and others were more exposed to me than if I had just left my clean NK95 mask on from the beginning.