Medical chaperone/escort

Usually I'm the one who brings my mum to her medical appointments but I haven't done so ever since interstate travel is banned. We had to utilise our back-up plan (which was used pre-pandemic times): my sister arranged Grab for my mum to make a return trip to Penang GH by herself.

We noticed, however, there were significant number of times that my mum would coincidentally felt unwell on appointment dates and thus needed to postpone them. After a recent episode, I decided to talk to her and tried to tease out the underlying reason. She confirmed my guess that she felt anxious and/or stressed when needing to go by herself. This was due to only one reason: queueing at the pharmacy.

At the GH pharmacy, we need to queue twice: one is to hand in the prescription slip and the red card to later collect medicine for the mont and the sceond time is to hand in the same items to update postal service to deliver the subsequent monthly supply of medicine. My mum cannot stand long: she will get back ache. Unlike my dad or my nephew, she's uncomfortable to approach strangers in the queue (there is a queue for senior citizens/diabled person but it's also quite long) for help and maybe even offer, say, RM 10 for the help.

About a year ago or so, from my cousin, we came to know of an organisation, Oretha's Senior Concierge Services, that offers service to accompany old folks to hospital but they operate only in Klang Valley. So, I tried finding one that operates in Penang and decided to give MyCare Concierge a try, after getting some information from them.

MyCare Concierge provides a wide range of services but I stressed that we merely need a medical chaperone because my mum can take care of herself. In fact, she can do everything (with my sister's help in arranging Grab) except for the queueing part. To ease my sister's responsibilities, we decided to get the chaperone's help in getting Grab too i.e. for them to meet my mum in Butterworth.

The charges were RM 150 for a 5-hour block plus RM 50 for the chaperone's return trip to Butterworth. We paid for the Grab.

Although my mum was happy with the chaperone, I was not entirely satisfied with the manager. Sometimes she didn't set timeframe on when she would get back to me on some things. More importantly, for those times she herself did set the timeframe ("I'll get back to you tomorrow"), she didn't follow through and ended with me chasing her instead. This was important because we had to find alternative if this didn't work out.

So, when they asked me to write a review, I wrote in Google that we were happy with the chaperone and that MyCare Concierge took into account of our needs. I also suggested the following improvement: (1) set timeframe, and (2) follow the timeframe.

Unfortunately, things worsened during the second time we engaged them:

(1) The medical chaperone was late by 40 mins, with no apology given. My mum and I suspected that the manager didn't tell the chaperon the new time (12pm, instead of 12.30pm for the previous engagement), a time that the manager herself proposed!

(2) Again, I had to chase the manager after she failed to get back to me within the timeframe that she herself set.

(3) Right up to the appointment date, I twice asked for the receipt of our payment. It's now been more than 3 weeks and yet still no receipt.

Since it's highly likely the the interstate travel ban will still be in-force for the next few months, I googled once again for alternatives and spoke to Homage. Their fee is the same i.e. RM 30 per hour but the transport fee is a flat RM 10 (vs RM 50). This time, we requested the medical escort to meet my mum at the GH's pharmacy, help by queueing twice and then finally order Grab for my mum to go home. This should take a conservative estimated time of 2 hours. Hopefully they're much better than MyCare Concierge.