Present state of meself.

I agree with Richard wrt  becoming knowledgeable and ‘helping others to help you’.  Unfortunately despite what the Tory propaganda machine says about NHS funding, the system is close to becoming unravelled. I have a good relationship with my GP and she said that she had reluctantly been forced to halve her hours as there was a stark choice between her family and her job. She just could not do justice to one without screwing up the other. I cannot say I blame her as she was working a 60 hour week for most of the year including the greater part of school holidays.

Luckily I live in an area that has an excellent IT system and the well trained admin staff know how to feed it and wheedle out mobile phone contacts etc from patients to the extent I get a pretty seamless automated system of call-ups, reminders and prescription renewals which has taken some load off the GPs, but obviously not enough to balance all job/family pressures.

I hate to think what happens in less attractive inner city areas with carp systems.

Our surgery has several different GPs almost all if not all work part time. One works alternate weeks, not because of anything else except that he feels he pays too much income tax. He does not need the extra hassle for half pay, so he tends to do one week on and one week off.

While text messages can be a great way to send out reminders, – if they are sent out, but voice over mobile is pure rubbish from home. Callers get told to call the land line to have a meaningful conversation. Admin is a real bear trap, daughter had several lots of treatment and a swab was taken. Her carer, her mother, tried several times to find the results to no effect*. Then daughter was taken back to see a GP and the missing results were ‘found’. The previous treatments had been totally useless. They were no better than ‘vitamin pills’ for the infection.

*Two possible causes for the delay, the clerical ‘could certainly do better’ and the lab has internal issues where the egotist in charge is trying to empire build by slowing down throughput and claiming the need for more staff to speed things up again.

A bit of happier progress, my wife rang the ‘ring us when you can line‘ and pointed out the situation. The innocent clerk instantly recognised a major cock-up when she heard one and has shoehorned my wife in for 5 p.m. today.

Our surgery is planning an extension, but at least there is a public car park right next door with spaces normally available, free for 30 minutes, 20 pence for the first hour. So 20 pence is usually enough for the visit. Being far enough from the station and with parking day rates set high enough it is not really an all day option for commuters.

One of the issues with NHS IT is the number of users who will still not use it properly. Most procedures have codes, but some do not wish to use the codes and write long hand in hard to read scrawls and demand telephone responses as they cannot understand the electronic notes.

Well done, for getting an answer. Now we hope it will translate into the desired result for you tomorrow. If it does not pan out do not let the matter slide off the table, it is vital you get what your need.

Great news.

Richard wrote:

If 5 days lost in the post is their idea of urgent it is not mine or my wife’s

I haven’t had direct experience in the NHS, but in a major energy company. I’ve been told the NHS works the same way in some trusts though:

If you speak to someone on a Monday, they put the request for a letter into the system. The requests are processed at the end of the working day.

Tuesday morning, the person responsible for writing the actual letter gets the request. They pull up your details, type up the letter, and send it off to be posted. Postal requests are processed at the end of the working day.

Wednesday morning, the internal post office gets your letter, stamps it, puts it in a sack with the hundreds of others, and takes it to the Post Office, usually for second class or slower postage.

The Post Office is generally pretty good, and processes your letter on the same day if you’re lucky, but as it’s second class at best, it takes two or three days to arrive as a minimum.

It’s now at least Friday or Saturday before your urgent letter arrives, assuming everything’s gone smoothly.

We were always told to tell customers that letters take seven to ten working days to arrive using this system, as even our bosses knew that things rarely ran smoothly. It’s really frustrating that all these years later, and with all the technological advances in the meantime, that this system still seems to be in use, and is getting more broken than ever!

This highlights the difference between a company with a monopoly (or government run), and a company that has to keep evolving its service to compete in a sector, where the product (eleccy in this case) is the same no matter your supplier.

You can go two routes, compete on price, but this you can only go so far, or compete by offering try best costomer service.

It’s the latter that keeps me with Amazon for example. It’s also why I left BT and Sky. BT ten years ago was horrific to contact, and sky was not quite as bad, but they have an almost monopoly on tv so they don’t need to worry about price or service.of you want it you have to put up with both.

So I wouldn’t expect the NHS to evolve anytime soon. If anything bits will epvolve, while others won’t, and the two will gel worse than pre evolution, making matters actually worse.

What’s worse is it should be a simple and relatively cheap issue to solve. Though if you streamline the ship, it will end up in redundancy. And give its government pay, it’s better ecomomics to keep it inefficient and employ more people, than get rid of them and pay them benifits and them have less disposable income.

Given the NHS is probably the largest employer in thd UK, if they was to overhaul it, the unemployed numbers would jump though the roof, and the net disposable income would plumit, meaning less pounds floating around. The knock on effect is layoffs in shops, pubs, restraints. food sales drops that would then impact manufacturing etc…

So ultimately its more economically efficient, to be less efficient right across the civil service.

Basically, our medical mail isn’t going to be getting here any quicker any time soon. A simple email direct to your doc could be done in 12h. But instead we employ many to send a letter to you on 7 days, and you pass it on to a doc assistant to them sort it and input it into the system. Ironically the same system the assistant in the hospital had to print it from.

I’ll stop now. I’m sat in an ozzy atm, why Doris is getting zapped. Sigh.

I have to agree with that, move my wife is a regular at our cancer unit, she is on text messaging terms with her team. The official stuff just follows behind.

But this sort of backs up my view of its an easily fixed system, but it’s in no one’s interest to fix it.