NHS fun redux
Lots of hilarity with hospital visits, x-rays and blood tests today. Even better, the NHS’s “Choose and Book” system is only compatible with Internet Explorer. It is also ugly as all get-out, and functions as if it were built about ten years ago - we’re talking Web 0.0. Then, of course, when I finally get to the doctor’s appointment I want to book (approximate waiting time for an appointment: 54 days), it turns out that you can’t actually book the appointment online after all. So why in God’s name did my doctor give me a piece of paper from the NHS which told me I could book online? Answer: Because the NHS is a piece of shit and we pay for it whether it sucks or not.
UPDATE: Oh, this was amusing: I called to make the appointment, at which point I was placed on hold for a good 15 minutes. When the call was finally answered and I gave the operator my reference number, she asked me, “Do you have this on your computer screen right now?” Nope; I’d shut my laptop, and it had been off for at least 20 minutes at that point. “Well, it says the user is modifying the appointment, so it won’t let me do anything with it. You’re going to have to call back.” Actually, I’d prefer if you called me back; I know I’m not a customer, since I’m forced to pay for this service even thought it doesn’t work and even if I don’t use it, but it’s not convenient for me to hang on the phone for ages, listening to the insincere “We know your call is important” recording. So the operator said she’d try to register me with the system while she waited for the lock-out on my appointment to de-activate. Except she can’t even do that while the system still believes I’m modifying the appointment online. She’s going to call me back. Hopefully I’ll get to see a doctor before December.
UPDATE 2: I finally got a call back, and a date: I have a doctor’s appointment 57 days from now. Woo-friggin’-hoo.
Filed under: Life, Politics, Survival, The State Is Not Your Friend
Well, your story hits the point. I am a GP and being a locum doctor in the larger London area I came across the “Choose and Book” system only in Kingston. The NHS people there keep telling me taht it is a plain nuisance, because it simly is too complicate dand breaks down all the time. My impression is, that it is just one more of those endless window dressings where these highly paid NHS bureaucrats pretend to fix something and in fact :wink:its a blunder.
[…] It seems like only yesterday that I was in NHS appointment hell, but actually it was 20 days ago. (I’ve had to make five other appointments since then, but the processes for those weren’t nearly as tortured.) […]
[…] Can you imagine innovative and truly useful customer service like this in the NHS? Well, obviously not, because we’re not customers, we’re suckers (aka taxpayers) who have to fund the damn system whether it works or not, whether we like it or not. (See also my post on the NHS’s embarrassingly crap “Choose and Book” system.) Posted by Jackie Danicki | […]