Jackie Danicki

So Labour is concentrating on how to shut down hospitals in marginal constituencies without losing their seats. Nice. And not terribly surprising. Power corrupts absolutely, and Labour is living proof of this.

This past week, I had to register with a new GP. I’ve avoided doing this for about five years, as any dealings with the NHS just leave me terribly irritated. I have had private health care with my jobs, but never made any use of it. We’re going to Egypt next month, though, and I need several jabs prior to going, so Antoine advised me to go to the doctors’ office which is across the road from the one he goes to. “They can’t be harder to deal with than the staff at my doctor’s surgery,” he told me. This one is about a two minute walk from our house, and closer to us than the one where Antoine is a patient.

So…my registration appointment was with the nurse. She was very nice and polite, and complimented me on my excellent blood pressure as if I’d been training for it. We discussed my ongoing weight loss, and she advised me not to gain any muscle. “Why not? It burns fat even while you sleep, right?” I asked, incredulous, as this is something that I have been told by many fitness experts. “Yes, but then you’ll weigh more on the scale,” she told me. The stupidity of this advice is astonishing. As Antoine pointed out, though, the system demands that certain metrics behave in certain ways, and if improving my health interferes with the system’s demands, that’s quite inconvenient for the system.

When I told her that Sudafed was doing nothing for the illness I’d picked up on my flight home, she advised me that water was the cure. “Just drink water,” she said.

Finally, I asked her what Antoine’s odds of being able to switch to this surgery were, as he has so many problems with his current doctor’s office. (He’s asthmatic, and it is a bit of a problem when the staff decide to close the office without announcing that they will be doing so, and he’s unable to pick up his prescription inhalers. Also, one of the big ’selling points’ of his doctor’s surgery was that they have a nebulizer for asthmatic patients to use. But every request actually to use it is rejected, always, to the point where one wonders if they even have one. And on and on.)

She sighed. “You cannot just switch like that. It’s fine for you to come here as a new patient, but your fiancé cannot. He’s stuck.”

“Even though this office is actually closer to us than Dr _________’s?”

“It doesn’t matter. They balance one another.”

And if you’re wondering why I won’t name my doctor or his, it’s because doctors are allowed to strike you off their list of patients, and “there is very little you can do if you have been struck off. GPs are free to strike you off their list if they want to.” Fun like that will have to wait until after we’ve had our jabs for Egypt, I’m afraid.

Filed under: Life, Survival, The State Is Not Your Friend, Treating Customers Well