Review for Bullen Healthcare by Angeline

I had a deeply concerning experience with Bullen and would advise people to avoid them.

I’d seen an ad for them in a stoma support organisation’s magazine and thought I’d give them a try. The guy I spoke to on the phone told me that the other stoma supply companies all made unnecessary prescription requests (i.e. for things that patients like me have not asked for) to GP surgeries, adding unnecessarily to NHS costs and profiting from it. He said that the company I had been using until then had got half a million pounds out of the NHS in this way, and that their parent company had some kind of financial influence on hospital stoma nurses, and that this biased the product advice those nurses would give to patients.

It was all very alarming stuff to hear. At the time, I was very credulous (and very vulnerable, having just gone through extensive surgery) and assumed I’d had a lucky escape and ended up with an ethical company that was blowing the whistle on dodgy behaviour within their sector. Well, Bullen proceeded to behave with me in exactly the way that member of staff had accused other companies of behaving.

When my GP surgery informed me that Bullen had made prescription requests in my name without my knowledge or consent, I had a lengthy phonecall with one of their staff. I was also by now having problems getting items I did actually need! She was very concerned and said she was going to pass on my experience and get it sorted – obviously I didn’t want to use the company any more, but I felt it was important to stop this happening in general. I also insisted on emailing her the details of our conversation, as I was uneasy that I had no evidence of my original phone conversation with her colleague and wanted to record that this discussion had happened. I also stated that I wanted to stop using Bullen and wanted my details removed from their records. This turned out to be a problem.

What happened was that Bullen continued requesting prescriptions from my GP surgery. I informed them that Bullen had refused to comply with my requests re: closing my account and deleting my personal data, and they agreed to only provide scrips to my old supply company, which I had gone back to after the original Bullen fiasco. However, after repeat contact from me, it was apparent that Bullen had no intention of doing as I asked, and I ended up googling the email address of the company director, since reporting the company to the Care Quality Commission seemed to be a difficult process. When I contacted her, she emailed back and said she wanted to discuss it by phone, but I did not want to have another conversation with anyone from Bullen that wouldn’t generate its own record, so I insisted on email. I never heard from her again.

Obviously you can make your own minds up, but I found Bullen’s practices extremely odd and unethical and I would strongly advise against using them.