Ocean Park Health Center

This place is terrible. Zero interpersonal skills from staff and nurses. HIPAA violations everywhere. I have been there 5 times and have had a similar terrible experience every time, with poor communication, rude suggestions for maintaining health, leaving the office door open, asking private questions in the hallway, and typing notes while talking to me. Go to UCSF if you can, they are 10x more helpful and professional.

As a person who has a slight phobia of going to the doctor, I have to say Ocean Park health center made me feel much more at ease after my visit was over. The nurses/​staff are very nice. Dr. Wong is very sweet, professional, thorough, caring, and makes her patients feel very much at ease and relaxed. She also has a very positive attitude when speaking with patients, is nonjudgmental, and makes suggestions rather than lectures. Not really sure why this health clinic has such low scores but I’m sure it had nothing to do with Dr. Wong. I think she might be new at this particular office?

It’s a health center which means care is sliding scale, often there are folks who have little or no insurance, state or county funded insurance and with that said you can expect:
* Long wait times
* Limited treatment options
* Basic care
* Dated technology
* Barebones treatment rooms
* Referrals go straight to General Hospital which sadly is poorly ran and takes a lengthy time 99% of the time. On average 30 days for any correspondence to take place in terms of making an appointment and that can be scheduled out a month or more.
* It may take a while to obtain an appointment.
* No emergent care (aside EKG for chest pain)
* Limited availability for Lab
* Staff can be a bit stiff at times.
What I will say that was refreshing was:
* EHR (electronic health records) which makes obtaining a copy of your test results nearly immediate.
* An amazing doctor whom I’m sure would be very successful in her own private practice (Dr. Wong is great and really cares about her patients).
* My last two appointments took less than 30min total.
* Works well with my insurance and they do not limit medication to generics.
* Always calls me back when I have a question for the nurse or doctor.
Obviously I’ve been to better practices, but for this being a clinic which serves a multitude of patients from all backgrounds, they are quite well ran. If you have to pick a clinic based on Healthy SF, Healthy Workers (my insurance), or have Medi-​Cal this is a great option compared to the horrible experience I had at Potrero Hill Health Center.

I would give 0 stars if I could. This place was infested with bugs I’m surprised they can get away with practicing medicine. They really need to be inspected because they’ve probably made more people sick than they’ve helped. I left with more bug bites than I did service. I got treated very unprofessionally. The lead nurse or whoever she was laughed at my medical history and laughed at every serious issue I told her about. It’s unfortunate that my crappy insurance is only acknowledged at that dump. I never want to go back there. It is like the doctor’s offices you would see in a horror movie only it’s dirtier and crawling with bugs.

Went there to have a lump checked out in my nose. A Dr. Wong said not to worry about it that it would go away and that it was only 2 mm. Luckily I had an appointment with the dentist and after an x-​ray they said it was more serious. Got a referral for an oral surgeon and he operated right away and found the cyst to be 30 mm not 2 mm. The cyst had destroyed some nerves and bone matter. I also had to have a bone graft done. Could you imagined what would had happened if I had listen to that doctor and left that lump alone?

Ocean Park health center is a local medical facility located in the Sunset District of San Francisco. That allows the neighborhood community to take full advantage of a smaller medical facility without having to deal with big hospitals or their bills.
Ocean Park deals with/​and takes a multitude of different Insurance companies coverage from their patience. They even deal with low income or healthy SF. The providers and nurses here are very friendly and hospitable. They will constantly make sure your needs are being met and they always conduct all their business with a friendly disposition. Although there may be a little bit of a language barrier, (because most of the nurses here are of Asian background and some have strong accents) that doesn’t stop them or anyone else from giving excellent customer service. Another good thing about Ocean Park is the fact that they except all age ranges and even deal with expected mother’s or newborn’s. Although there are a lot of great resources you can find at Ocean Park. There are a few things that people must know before they ask to be apart of this smaller facility.
First thing is since the facility is located in the Sunset District the parking here is awful. There is a higher percentage of finding parking at the meter then there is in the local neighborhood parking but even then you have to continuously pay the meter because the time doesn’t last very long. The second thing is the fact that in order to receive an appointment you will have to call Wayne advance. I have set appointments as far out as two months in advance because of the high-​volume of patients that want to see the doctor’s here. Finally if you have a situation where you need special medical equipment, i. e an x-​ray machine then you will not find that or items like that here. For those you will need to go to a large hospital because this facility generally deals with common ailments and situations.

I tried getting in here last September (about 7 months ago) when I first started having a consistent health problem (weird feeling/​pain in my throat) They said they didn’t have any immediate openings and they’d put me on the waiting list to be seen in January/​February. I was never contacted and my problem has gotten worse. Now it’s at the point where I can’t even fall asleep because I feel like I’m choking and I immediately wake up. It’s complete misery. I just tried calling them, and of course everything is automated and when I finally went through the process long enough to get to the point where I’m supposed to be able to set up or re-​schedule an appointment, I just get a busy/​disconnected signal.

Review is for the Ocean Park, not Anne Simons MD.
I had Healthy SF a couple of years ago and started going to Ocean Park Health Center even though it was far from where I lived because it seemed like a nice, clean facility. Back then I had a car. It was fantastic, I could usually get in right away when I needed to see a doctor. The doctors and the facility were outstanding for a public health service.
Unfortunately I’ve had to go back on Healthy SF again and started going to this center again. A lot has changed. Now any appointment has to be booked 2 to 3 months in advance. If your appointment needs to be booked more than 2 months in advance, you can’t even set up an appt. because their system does not go out more than 2 months so you have to sign up for a reminder card to be sent to you when your lucky number comes up and you are granted an opportunity to schedule an apt. 2 months later. As soon as you get that reminder card in the mail, you’d better call and set up your appointment immediately or you will have to wait longer than 2 months to schedule your appointment and you may have to keep calling in since their system can only go out no more than 2 months.
And don’t think you’re actually going to see a Dr when you schedule your «Doctor’s appointment» here. You now see only get to see a nurse practitioner. Anyone you speak to there will tell you you are seeing a Dr but you are likely only seeing a nurse practitioner. A nurse practitioner is a nurse with a Masters degree, not a medical Dr that went to medical school and spent years as an intern. Nurse practitioners focus on a holistic approach to treating people, they are not trained to diagnose medical conditions. I’ve been to plenty of primary care physicians who were terrible at diagnosing medical conditions so I’m not saying they are necessarily better than a nurse practitioner but to call a nurse practitioner a Dr and imply that he/​she is a medical Dr is incorrect and frankly, insulting to medical doctors.
Today I had a 10:45 am appointment. I arrived on time but was told my apt. was at 9:45 am so the Dr would not see me today. I just scheduled this apt 4 days ago (I was extremely lucky they allowed me to do that) and put the apt. on my calendar immediately. I am certain they told me it was at 10:45 am. Just before I was able to sign in to the apt. list, (I had originally signed the wrong list and no one was sitting behind any of the windows to ask for assistance), a girl came in who was 45 minutes late for her appointment but they took her in to see her Dr immediately. Not two minutes later, I was told that they would not see me until the following day. I pitched a bitch and they finally allowed me to see the «doctor» after waiting for an hour and 15 minutes.
This «doctor», aka nurse practitioner, would only prescribe drugs to me for the next 3 months and refused to allow me to see a specialist that could actually determine what was wrong and devise a plan for me. This is after seeing countless primary care physicians and specialists for 10 years that had finally concluded that I needed to see an allergist. Not the least of which was a «real doctor» I had gone to see at Healthy SF’s very own Urgent Care Center last week who also just happened to personally have the same thing I did. I had gone to see her due to an acute asthma attack and was having an extremely hard time breathing. In fact I nearly went to the emergency room the night before since I had such a hard time breathing. This Dr almost refused to give me an emergency inhaler insisting that the only problem I had was allergies and that I had to see an allergist. I would need a referral from a primary care Dr from Ocean Park, hence my apt. today.
The nurse practitioner at Ocean Park that prescribed the ongoing inhaler to me (this is different than an emergency inhaler) failed to prescribe the tube that is supposed to be associated with it to help the inhaler get the stuff down into my lungs rather than just my mouth. This was pointed out to me by the Pharmacist (at least the frickin Walgreens Pharmacists new what they were doing). I also asked the nurse practitioner some questions about a sprained foot. She knew very little about my foot or what to do about it. I asked the center for some crutches, at first it was a fight to get them to give me some crutches. Now that I’m home, I see that they gave me the wrong size crutches. So I will have to go back to the center tomorrow and get the correct size crutches and go back to the pharmacist to get the tube. This is how one Dr’s apt. took my entire day today but it’s not over. Tomorrow I have to go back to Ocean Park and the pharmacy to take care of all of the things they gave me that were wrong or incomplete, neither of these places are near each other or near where I live.
I realize I am lucky to have low cost health care but with services this bad, who would realistically use them?