Bloody NHS
Mar. 12th, 2011 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wellinghallI 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-12 11:14 am (UTC)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.