Author: WhatNowDoc

Letter to my GP surgery…hello?

booking

Dear Sirs,

Not for the first time I find it necessary to make my feelings known with regard to the mechanism for obtaining an appointment at Langley Corner surgery.  I’ve heard all the platitudes before, “it works very well”, “other people like the system”, and so on.  It works well for the practice, it does not work well for the patients, their employers or, frankly, any other stakeholders such as the Urgent Treatment Centre, Accident & Emergency Department, etc.

Let me give you some specifics.  In February 2012 I was diagnosed with a NSCLC tumour on my right lung.  By a stroke of immense good luck it was only Stage II and thus, by definition, had not metastasised.  The fact is that I had been putting off visiting the surgery to check out my persistent nocturnal cough because I was too busy to have to take part in the daily gymkhana you organise each morning.  This is the event where patients/clients/taxpayers are supposed to delay or cancel their journey to work so that they can be at home, able to make a tedious series of telephone calls to the surgery, the vast majority of which are greeted with an engaged signal, in a desperate attempt to be one of the lucky ones to a) get their call answered and b) the even fewer to hold the lucky Lotto ticket to get to see a doctor that day.  Of course, having cancelled their trip to work, many then have to take another day off so they can subject themselves to your sordid game-playing all over again, the following day.  Frankly, I consider it abusive and I have no intention of subjugating myself to this despicable practice.  It was eighteen months before I could bring myself to play this silly game and if you think I’m the only one who puts it off, even when it’s potentially as serious as it was for me, you’re kidding yourselves and doing a huge disservice to the very people who pay your salaries.

You eventually commissioned a web site, one using 1990’s technology, and offered an appointment booking system there but that too has strict limitations on how one may book an appointment and we are specifically barred from making an appointment for that day or the next.

bookhere

What a complete waste of money and when, on earth, will someone commission a modern day replacement, something akin to the average two-bit restaurants?

In 2005 I recall Tony Blair being questioned in front of a Question Time audience and discovering to his amazement that one couldn’t simply pick up the telephone and book a doctor’s appointment.  More than ten years later there’s been absolutely no improvement.  There is no commercial enterprise on the planet that would still be in business one year down the line, let alone ten, if it deigned to treat its customers in such a disrespectful and condescending manner as this.  Every business or other organisation in the world manages to organise a working appointment system, I cannot conceive that it is beyond the wit of a group of clever individuals such as a medical practice to achieve the same outcome, if they only put their minds to it.  It is one of the reasons why I so despise the way in which health services are delivered within the NHS.  It’s the attitude that we are getting something for free, that doctors’ needs are paramount and that we, the clients, will just fall into line with whatever arcane process is made available to us.  Well, I pay significantly more to the NHS than I do for my own private health insurance which, as you might imagine, has risen significantly since my two recent cancer diagnoses. I’m paying expensively for your services and then I’m paying all over again so that I don’t have to use them.  I can cope with that but I refuse to be treated like some kind of beggar pleading for the very service for which I am paying through the nose.

I don’t choose to use you, you have an effectively monopoly or near monopoly, I am obliged by your trade union rules to use you.  I can even cope with that, if you would simply do me the courtesy of bearing in mind the incredible competitive advantage you have been gifted rather than abusing it and me with these ridiculous procedures.  So, let’s turn to this week.

On my file you hold several letters from the senior Dermatology Consultant, Dr. Susie Morris, whom I pay privately.  In those letters Susie Morris documents the medications she has prescribed for my psoriasis, the ones I usually purchase privately at my own expense.  Knowing that I am soon to need further supplies of Dovobet gel and knowing that my wife intended to make an appointment to see a doctor at the surgery, I asked her if she would request a prescription for this small but essential item.  I don’t care if I have to pay for it but I can’t get hold of it without a prescription.  My wife wasn’t able to get her appointment (and thus ended up at the Urgent Treatment Centre yesterday for four hours) but she did make a telephone request for my prescription which was accepted.  Yesterday I received a text asking me to call the surgery with regard to this request, which I did.  I was advised that “the doctor” had requested a face to face meeting before agreeing the prescription, despite the fact that my records show it has been prescribed by my consultant who, were there any doubt, could have been called for confirmation.  All of which would have been faster, simpler and less costly for all concerned than a text, a phone call and a doctor’s appointment……  I was told to ring the next day at 8:30, I refused.  I was told I couldn’t have an appointment until sometime in August.  I was told I couldn’t have a telephone appointment until next Tuesday.  I told the lady not to bother.

I emailed my consultant and within five minutes a prescription was winging its way to me in the post.  Sure, it cost me another twenty pounds but I’d happily pay fifty to avoid being subjected to this demeaning process of yours.  That said, I do resent it.  I pay enormous amounts of tax to support your income, I pay again for my health insurance, I pay for my own consultants’ visits and for my medications – even though I have an exemption card as a result of my cancer.  All I asked for was a wretched piece of paper and mountains had to me made out of molehills.  People wonder why the NHS is so desperately short of cash, you don’t have to look very far, do you?

I am sure you are all very lovely and well-meaning people.  I’m equally sure you will not appreciate the tone of this letter.  I’m afraid I don’t have the time or patience to waste time on frivolous pleasantries when I’m already annoyed that I should have to waste more time writing the darn thing.  Perhaps, once you’ve put your own considerations to one side you might stop and think about the nuggets of crucial information I am delivering, free of charge and recognise that there are better ways to do things, that your current ways are self-serving, disrespectful, offensive and wasteful.  I just happen to be in the minority of people that will bother/dare to tell you so but I’m also the tip of an iceberg.  A little business-like attention to such matters would improve your lives as well as ours.  There would be less time wasted in the workplace, less burdens placed on A&E and other facilities, more money in your pockets.  It’s not rocket science.

….if I get a reply I’ll update this blog….yawn….

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! Well almost….

Freedom

we did it or, to put it more accurately, the largest number of British voters who ever voted for anything, did it.  We are to leave the EU.  For weeks since the vote I’ve not dared utter these words for fear that our illustrious leaders would find a way to wriggle out of it.  David Cameron’s resignation didn’t convince me, nor did Teresa May’s appointment but her decision to appoint Boris Johnson, David Davies and Liam Fox to the top three Brexit positions – apart from providing her with armour in the event it all goes terribly wrong – tells me we have the best possible chance of making sure that we really, really are going to leave.  Now, god help us, it’s up to these three, their colleagues, our Prime Minister and an army of civil servants to make sure that we negotiate the right deal using all the cards we hold in our sixty-five million pairs of hands.

The first message that needs to go out is this:  There are no remainers or leavers.  We are all leavers now.

I’m not the one that bangs the drum for democracy, I just have to put up with it but for all of those who love to bang that drum, you asked for it, you got it, now abide by it and for heavens sake:  Stop the communal grieving and hand-wringing; stop talking us all down; stop praying for it all to go horribly wrong so you can bang the “I told you so” drum; get over it and get on with it.  We are leaving.  This is a good thing.  It has absolutely nothing to do with racism, despite there being some racists who agreed with us.  It has nothing to do with being against other people in Europe.  We are not going to shove off into the North Atlantic.  We are tethered to Europe, we are part of Europe, we are European, we love our European neighbours, we are leaving the European Union, that’s all.  The EU is nothing more than a flawed political project, run by politicians for politicians that is doomed to failure.

For a truly erudite opinion on the EU and why we voted to leave it, read this BBC Radio4 item by philosopher Roger Scruton.  Whilst you wouldn’t expect me to agree with everything he says, I find his analysis very much “on the money” and I love the way that, for once, we can hear an opinion on the EU that is calm and measured whilst not lacking a grain of passion.  Compare that, if you will, with the words of one Peter Mandelson (yes him!) whose mealy-mouthed confessions about how the Remain Campaign screwed up by not following his advice on how to manipulate the plebs, as he regards them, into “seeing sense” and voting the way he wanted them to.  It is precisely this man, his ilk, and what he represents, the views he espouses here, the plum job he holds for life at the heart of this rotten project that helped seventeen million people to make up their minds….and he doesn’t get it.  Well, coming from the man at the heart of manipulating the path to war in Iraq, that’s fine by me.  If I’m not mistaken, once we leave the EU, he and his cronies all lose their jobs- yay!

I do worry about Mrs. May though.  She’s hardly an intellectual giant.  That vomit-inducing sop to the nation outside #10 last night was really very worrying.  I am very worried that the venomous minnow Amber Rudd was given the Home Office, apparently because she sometimes wears a skirt – given she lacks any other qualifications and given the mantra that a person’s gender is more important than their capabilities.  As the not so erudite but very plain spoken Tom Winnifrith said of this policy:

“Out here in the real world we care not whether a cabinet minister is a woman or a man, whether they have had children or not and whether they are gay or straight. We do not want targets based on who you shag or what, if anything, results from that shagging. Would it be too much to ask just to have a cabinet with the most talented people in it?”  Here bloody here.

Time will tell but I don’t expect to be surprised.  Today we’re told that Mark Carney and his central banking colleagues are going to drop interest rates in order to “avoid a recession”.  Put it another way, he wants to devalue sterling, in the same way that every major economy in the world is trying to devalue their currency in competition with everyone else.  print

Well, Something which China has managed to do by stealth and almost unnoticed.  I get the motivation (but the media won’t report it this way, they’ll talk about how this benefits those with mortgages – as opposed to those who could only dream of having a mortgage) but right now, Mr. Carney, we should not be sending messages to the world that suggest we aren’t confident about our own future.  Then again, of course, you’re only here on a temporary contract aren’t you and, given you agree with the madness of low to negative interest rates, the manic printing of money, the amassing of untold mountains of government debt (which our grandchildren will pick up the tab for), the asset bubbles created by lunatic central bankers across the world, well, you probably will won’t you….

But I’d be lying if I said I really cared.  I’m a very happy bunny.  I’ve got the only thing I ever really wanted from my politicians, I’ve got our freedom back and I can’t wait to see what we can all do with it, together.