Our wonderful NHS

James Van Patten

Are you insane? You had to wait 50 minutes? Boohoo, you stupid bloody snob. Maybe you should have gone to your usual private GP and made the queue one person shorter for the rest of us?

Nicola

50 minutes IS unreasonable. If I was 50 minutes late for a meeting I would be extremely embarrassed and apologetic for wasting the other person's time. We are not talking here about people waiting in a triage queue, we are talking about total disregard of an appointment system the NHS has set up. If there is one thing that can be truly said about the NHS it is that they are unbelievably profligate with other people's time. Two recent examples from my own family's experience (and by recent I mean within the last two months):

- my partner had an appointment with an eye specialist to check up on an eye infection. The doctor was two hours late seeing him, no joke when you are a self-employed contractor who has just begun a new contract.

- I was admitted to hospital for an investigation into a possible pregnancy-related blood clot. I was unlucky enough to arrive at a moment when the labour ward was extremely busy with a lot of women giving births and an abnormally large number of complex cases. Fair enough, I don't expect to be the priority in this situation. As a consequence I was admitted overnight to wait for my scan. At 5.30pm the following day I was called from the ward to be taken to the nuclear medicine department. Unfortunately the porter had forgotten to bring a chair and had then disappeared. I was not permitted to walk to the scan department although I was only six months pregnant and there was no reason why I couldn't. By the time the porter reappeared the nuclear medicine department had rung to say the half-life of the radioactive isotopes they had been planning to inject into me had expired and they could not proceed with the scan that day. As this was Friday evening, it soon became clear that the plan was that I would remain in hospital for the rest of the weekend before getting my scan on Monday morning. After some negotiation it was agreed that I could be discharged for the weekend providing I was prepared to self-administer the drugs I was on. From the point at which the discharge was agreed, it took - and I am not joking - twenty hours for this to happen.

Don't tell me there are no business process improvements to be made here.

Alf Tupper

If I could go private I would. Accusations of snobbery I can't see gets anyone anywhere.
But I have to ask why on Earth would you put yourself through this if you have an alternative?

In my experience the NHS do good work as soon as you make it past the sniffle trench.

Even waiting times I've been lucky with. It's just the cursory and dismissive way that the younger doctors handle things that I have an issue with.

James

Without wishing to turn this into 'Speak your brains' on the radio, i'd like to add evidence to the charge that surgeries treat patients with contempt, or more specifically practice managers. My wife wants to change doctors - not unreasonably she wants a female doctor - and went along to the local megaclinic to ask to switch from our current two doctor local practice. She was told that the surgery needed instruction from the Primary Care Trust to allow her to switch. She called the PTC, which told her enthusiastically that it was her right as a patient to use the doctor she wanted, she paid for it after all out of her taxes, and she could of course switch. She sent a letter to the surgery informing them of the PTC's view. When she called again to register she was told that, as she had registered elsewhere she would not be accepted. However had she not registered elsewhere, she would be accepted. Another call to the PTC followed, but their market-driven idealism had dwindled, and they could see no other option that to ring them every day and plead. "Maybe they got out of bed the wrong side" was the possible explanation. There is therefore room at the practice, the NHS policy is to respond to requests to change , but the whims of the practice management make it impossible.