23. Rant

14 Nov 2019 – Thursday

My apologies in advance – there’s a rant or two coming.

RANT

It’s election time and it seems the second most important topic is NHS funding. Well, having made use of the service quite a lot recently I’d say – about time. However, I’ll first say that all the doctors, nurses, porters, cleaners, cooks, etc are fantastic individuals coming from a huge variety of countries and we should not be erecting barriers to those that want to work in our health service.

Failure 1 – So, let’s pick up where I left off. Bilateral pulmonary embolisms, and injections of thinners. At that trip to A&E they asked the cardiology department to give me an urgent echocardiogram – I was sitting not 3 feet from the sister and doctor as they called the department over 10 times. At the end of the day they both gave up.

Failure 2 – About 10 days later the cardiology department called to offer me an appointment. They were surprised that the request was for an urgent appointment 10 days ago. I suggested, given it was urgent, that it was lucky I had not gone up in smoke (my request is for cremation).

Failure 3 – A little urgent pressure and I had my echocardiogram. However no one could tell me when or how I would get my results. A doctor, unknown to me, was quoted as the requester, but “a copy would go to my GP anyway”.

Failure 4 – Several days later my GP had no copy, no one at the cardio department would answer the phone, so I had to physically go to the hospital. Eventually they said they would post the results. POST THE RESULTS! In the 21st century the communication between the hospital and GPs is Royal Mail??!! After expressing urgency they agreed to call the GP surgery to get the fax number. FAX!! In the 21st century?

Failure 5 – I arranged an appointment with my GP. However even though the results had been “scanned” into the system, the means of viewing all documents had “been down all day”.

Failure 6 – “My GP” – you’re having a Turkish (if you don’t know look it up)! In the last 9 months I’ve had about 15 GP appointments. I’ve seen 14 different GPs – there’s no such thing as “my GP”.

Updates on my heaLth:

“Back Again in the NHS” – Just at the end of all that my GP sent me back to A&E as my breathing was getting worse after it had been improving. I am now unable to walk up two flights of stairs without pausing for breath. 4 blood vials, urine test, X-ray and CT, to say the pulmonary embolisms are still there but a little smaller. No answer then to why I seem to be getting worse. And a surprise – the unknown doctor, whose name was on the echocardiogram request, came to see me and said he didn’t know why an echocardiogram had been requested??!

Cold – I am experiencing very cold hands and feet. I’m not sure if that is still the chemo induced nerve damage or something new.

Heart rate – can be 105-120 sitting down, can go to 145 after 2 flights of stairs. While asleep at 0500 in the morning until my rejected DVT it was averaging 57, in the weeks since it is averaging 67, but climbing to 74 in the past few days.

27th November – the current planned date for the camera crew to pop into my abdominal cavity.

PAIN – extreme pain last Sunday – I bent a nail right back while attaching a battery charger to a car.

More Rants

Sorry yet more rants from my experience:

The private sector health care (which obviously saves the NHS money) can’t access patient records – first they need permission, then they need the postal service to deliver the results.

You might think the private sector is better, but my chemo hospital was run like a very tight business, to the extent that one Sunday when I was there the fire alarm was going off, but the hospital management team refused to call the service company as there was an additional out of hours call out fee.

Yet more rants about public money:

Just a few years ago I worked on a bid for the Met Police. They wanted a property management system to record lost, stolen and confiscated property. Until that new system went live a brown Gucci handbag, stolen in a violent mugging in Islington, could not be matched to a found brown Gucci handbag in Hackney. Each borough police force used a different system. Now they might have it solved for London, but every county specifies, tests, implements and operate their own choice of IT systems – yet they all do the same thing! And don’t think the Police National Computer is the answer – because it’s a sticking plaster – it just sits over the top and pulls out the juicy crimes. 

Then look at councils’ – again they all do the same thing – social housing, street cleaning, marriage licenses, libraries, planning applications, a thousand different things but the same thousand things as all the other councils. But they are all asked to go out and design and implement their own systems to manage it all. 26 county councils all with their own systems, paying 26 times for IT companies to look after them.

OK – rant over – I’m not sure it’s good for my health.