Doctor Denis Bergin’s Maitland surgery has been without a landline phone service for more than a month.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The High Street GP lost his Telstra connection when the superstorm hit in April and despite numerous calls to the telecommunications giant there has been no resolution.
“In the early days people couldn’t get on to us at all,” Doctor Bergin said.
“It was extremely inconvenient.
“A month later it is causing a great amount of difficulty for my patients.”
Dr Bergin would usually make 20 calls per day to talk to patients about their immediate health needs, including prescriptions, medication, treatment dates and more, but without a landline this has not been possible.
The doctor’s surgery has no switch and has had to redirect the landline number to a mobile phone.
Mr Bergin said Telstra could only divert one of the surgery’s two landline numbers to the mobile, which means many patients have not been able to contact the GP at all.
“It is grossly inconsiderate because they cannot even tell us when the line will be fixed,” he said.
“It is plain and simple that they [Telstra] have 10 per cent of the workforce required to deal with a breakdown of the network.”
Up until last week Maitland Private Hospital also had no landline service due to a Telstra network outage.
All calls to the hospital had to be diverted to one mobile phone and callers were then asked to contact one of 11 mobiles, depending on which section of the hospital they needed.
Telstra general manager Chris Cusack told the Mercury the company had about 100,000 fixed line outages and 30,000 ADSL service off air because of the storm.