Bloody NHS

[wellinghall]

I have just (9.15am on Saturday 12 March) received a letter from St Mark's hospital in London, informing me of an appointment.


The letter was dated 9 March.
The postmark on the envelope was dated 10 March, and it was posted second class.
The appointment is for 8.30 am on Monday 14 March.

The letter asked me to ring one of two numbers if I could not attend, and said that there would be an answering machine out of hours. I have just rung both numbers, to find there was no answering machine.

The NHS really needs to get its act together.

ETA: That hospital's admin has repeatedly proved itself to be poor, even by NHS standards. A shame, because their clinical care is great.

ETA2: Thinking about it more clearly, and prompted by a friend's post on Facebook -

I can see that the process for making the appointment might well have been largely automatic from their point of view - "Give this chap the next free appointment." However, something is wrong somewhere - either in the design of the process, or in its implementation - when it neither enables me to attend that appointment, nor to let them know that I will not be able to attend.

I have received much great clinical care from the NHS (and some pretty poor care, too); and most of the time, the admin works just fine. However, there have also been occasions - particularly with this hospital - when fairly routine admin, particularly around making appointments, goes badly wrong.

Comments

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Jeez...that is spectacular admin fail... It's one thing for the NHS to complain about missed appointments because people are unreliable/lazy/disorganised - it's another thing when they make apppointments for people and then provide them with no opportunity to communicate that they can't be kept before they miss them!

Argh!

[gurthaew.livejournal.com]

A couple of NHS related things spring to mind. One time I was instructed to book a follow-up appointment with the doctor's secretary. I spoke to the secretary and using my diary and her list of available appointments, we were able to set a date and time that was convenient for me. Two weeks later, I received a letter rescheduling the appointment to date that I had told the secretary that I couldn't make.

The more recent one was at our doctor's surgery. I'd booked the first appointment in the morning so that I could go on to work immediately afterwards. When I arrived (in adequate time), I found that several people had been bumped up the queue in front of me and I was, effectively, 35 minutes early for the new time.

If the government wants to save money, it could replace all the NHS bookings systems with a random number generator of the type found on cheap calculators. This would have the added advantage that, on occasion, the random number generator would come up with the correct time.

[emperor]

That's ... suboptimal. Good luck with getting a replacement appointment soon!

[brightlywoven.livejournal.com]

"The NHS really needs to get its act together."

I understand your frustration, and this is a crap thing to happen, but the NHS is an organisation with over a million employees. A failing at one point is not representative of the entire entity, and I really wish people (you're certainly not the only or the worst culprit here) wouldn't damn the whole thing over one inconvenience. (Because after all, you will still get an appointment, and even if the answering machine were switched on, it's not as though they will be able to give the slot to someone else between now and then.)

And even if this is an intrinsic feature of the whole organisation, as I recently read, when it comes to health services, you can have good and cost effective, you have good and convenient, but you can't have good, and cost effective and convenient.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I entirely agree that I shouldn't damn the whole organisation over one incident. Unfortunately - and I know I didn't make this clear in my post - this isn't an isolated incident. That hospital, in particular, usually - and I do mean more than half the time - has some admin problem over my appointments.

[brightlywoven.livejournal.com]

yes, but the appointment makers in one hospital aren't 'the nhs'!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Fair point.

(I seem to remember, though, you criticising UK university exam systems, and UK water, on the basis of Oxford exam systems and Oxford water).

[brightlywoven.livejournal.com]

To the first, yes, but I accepted correction when it was pointed out to me that Oxford was an outlier.
The second was based on Oxford, London, Brighton and Lakes water. And having been as far north as Edinburgh, I'm yet to have a cup of tea made from any tap water in the UK without scum on it.

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

Of course they COULD have given the appointment to someone else had they sent the appointment letter in a timely manner, so it's wasting staff time and money, of which there isn't any to waste (which we are being told all the time).

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Gurthaew's experience makes me think, in the light of this post, that ceratin admin bits are seeming to fail not because they are crap but because of political (and thus managerial) pressure to fill the first available appointment slot so as to be seen to be ticking the 'seen asap' box; irrespective of the actual workability of that appointment for anyone concerned. So this sort of thing is more about the politicians than it is about the clinicians or actually the admin arm.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

You could be right there.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Just a thought, but have you tried leaving the numbers ringing for an absurdly long time? I rang someone back the other day and because I was distracted by something on the PC at the same time I let it ring far more than I would usually, and found that there was an answerphone hiding at what must have been around the 25th - 30th ring!

Might also be worth trying at a different time of day, in case the VM is automatically activated in the evening or something?

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Not helpful, it is? I had a routine appointment on Tuesday with the gp which I'd had to fight for - I have an annual blood test and medication review for a chronic condition. As I have been *very* ill in the past, I am not happy to just ring in for the results and not see the gp. I had to plead to book the appointment and it was three weeks before they had one available. Sitting in the waiting room at 8.30 am I could hear the receptionists telling people there was no appointment available that day and directing them to e.g. phone the emergency duty midwife at the local hospital. It was actually quite scary that the system is under so much pressure, and clearly failing people who needed their gp.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

Are you sure it's the 14th March 2011? Because I recall making a similar complaint a few years back and then looking at the letter more closely and realising that the appointment was for the following year...

The new systems have cut down that sort of waiting time, but our GP still advises us not to book with one local hospital because their booking system is crap.

That said, when I had to book an X-ray appointment recently I phoned through, got one the following day, and was in and out within an hour of the booked time.

Win some, lose some.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I was not impressed by a shirty message on my office answerphone from John Lewis telling me I had been out when they tried to deliver my bed, and that I needed to ring to re-arrange. This would be the bed that they delivered wrongly the first time, that they then promised to ring to re-arrange before I went on holiday, didn't do so, but did leave an answerphone message to tell me when they would be coming... Allegedly they will ring me back this afternoon to arrange...