OUR YEAR WITH THE NHS

There is much brilliant about the NHS. We are privileged within Britain, and particularly within London, to have ready access to such high quality medical care. During this past ‘Year of the Brain Tumour’ (my wife, not me, if you’re reading and don’t know us) we have come into contact with numerous superb and skilled professionals. However, the system they operate within has also been a cause of untold frustrations. It just seems so systematically dysfunctional that no political idea is going to suddenly make things better. It’s been a strange old year, and previously meaningless Westminster phrases like ‘joined up thinking’ or ‘bureaucratic waste’ now in fact mean a great deal to me.



To explain: my wife only got her fateful brain scan in the first place because she had a tantrum in her latest of many appointments about the fact she’d lost the hearing in one ear. Up to then every single appointment was with someone different – they were all in a hurry and running behind schedule. None of them ever had access to the ‘big picture’ based on the combined judgements of each – it was just isolated shots in the dark (a personal favourite being the fact she had water in her ear…). There was a notable reluctance to allow her that scan – a reluctance based on the cost involved and the statistics game; a tumour being statistically a most improbable cause.


Once through that hurdle and onto the level of being taken seriously (and once you get here the professionals, particularly at St George’s, really are experts) the main problem became, and indeed remains, communication. There are no integrated computerized systems. No – there is a beige folder with my wife’s name on it, and it can only be in one place at a time. It often appears to be in the wrong place. What address it has on it I’m not sure, but even after this past year there is still a consistent problem with anything being sent to our address. Random important bits of mail continue to show up, eventually, at my wife’s parents’ house – an address at which she last lived about 7 years ago. There were delays at her initial appointment because the doctor’s referral letter – literally a bit of paper – couldn’t be found. There were delays in arranging the operation as the actual scan photos were somewhere in the post. For six months after the operation, nobody saw her about her eye (in that whole time it had been unable to close) because no-one ever notified that department. Even now, we await notification of an appointment to learn of the results of her follow up brain scan carried out over a month ago. It’s proved impossible to get anyone on the phone about it.


In each case the problem eventually gets solved by the personal initiative of willing individuals within the system – of which there are many. But the mind boggles at how many of them must be traipsing around vast sites, or waiting on hold, in order to track down these pieces of paper circling the country – or indeed what that costs the taxpayer. And it could have been much, much worse. We have the country’s specialised brain unit within walking distance and I already knew the brain surgeon (the country’s best for this procedure) personally. I’m not at all convinced my wife would have been operated on yet, even now, had she been starting this process of enquiry whilst living in the middle of nowhere (well, at least not unless the symptoms had worsened dangerously).


To conclude, I look at those David Cameron posters talking about him not cutting the NHS and I don’t even know what that means. Like so many problems, chucking money at it or withdrawing it doesn’t seem to be the issue – rather systems and good management. Perhaps a better idea would be give the cash to Accenture so they can get in there and institute processes that work! Let me say once again in closing; the NHS hosts many of the cleverest and hardest working people this country has available. I just want to see their resources more effectively deployed.


PS Only fair to say, since writing this we’ve found a channel that works. An email to the hospital via the website led to a response within an hour, followed by a call from the relevant department within the next couple of days. A good discovery!