[kirklancaster]

I do not understand why the reception desk in all the doctor's surgeries I have ever been in, have to open directly onto the patient's waiting room.

It is relatively inexpensive to incorporate a separate reception room - a stud wall and door - with each patient collecting a paper 'number' from the dispenser as they enter the waiting room, then being buzzed in as the number is electronically displayed above the door.

The most intimate of details can then be given in the strictest privacy.

Along with over a dozen other seated patients in the waiting room, I have unwillingly overheard the most personal details being given to the receptionists in my doctors, including the names and addresses of really elderly infirm patients - hardly a safe or wise situation considering that drug addicts and burglars could have been among those waiting patients.

In addition to the above, of course, is the potentially highly embarrassing - and apparently mandatory - divulging of the nature of one's illness in such a public area.

On the subject of the disposition of receptionists, I am an eternal extrovert and joker and have never shirked from joking with the receptionists at my doctors, but I have only encountered a few 'sour faced unfriendly' ones in all the years that I have been registered at my surgery, and the rest have been very personable and ultra friendly, civil, polite, and helpful.

I cannot complain, because I have never been asked the nature of my illness by any of my doctor's receptionists, but I sympathise with anyone who has.