New Labour became a carbuncle on the body politic, and I have no difficulty in trying to forget the whole unloved, unlovely, duplicitous bunch of incompetents.
One of the problems is that they have been succeeded by an equally slippery and self-serving group of egoists.
This has been brought on by my assessment of one of New Labour's flagship projects - you know the kind that seeks to reform a system they think isn't working (it was) and replace it will an alternative that is less useful, doesn't do what it purports to do and costs millions more than what it has replaced. Allied to the fact that the project relies on rubbish IT and is badged as something it isn't, then you have the whole new Labour project in microcosm.
More expensive and of virtually no use. Rather like Tony Blair, in fact.
I was discussing (last night with some fellow GPs) the virtues of the system designed to enable patients to book an appointment with the consultant of their choice. It is completely useless. Useless. The people who designed and implemented it are clueless. Clueless.
In the past I wrote a letter. Put it in an envelope. Addressed it to a person. They opened it and read it, and decided what to do. That worked.
Choose and Book (as it is laughably called) does not. It should be renamed Not choose and Keep rebooking.
It cost millions and doesn't work.
So New Labour!
6 comments:
My late husband worked on this project, he told me it would never work as they requirements kept changing and the civil servants didn't know what they were talking about where commercial IT was concerned. He told our GP not to touch it with a barge pole unless he was forced to use it. I tried it once, useless! since then my referrals have gone back to normal, thankfully as I was found to asymptomatic lung cancer and had excellent surgery at GUYS and I could not offer one word of complaint about the hospital, staff and treatment. By some miracle even the food was good.
Well said. The NHS Choose and Book system is worse than useless - it seems designed to drive people to slash their wrists and jump off the nearest bridge. It has, over the past few days, reduced me to tears several times. I eventually got the appointment at the hospital I wanted (which, I only wanted because it's a couple of miles from my home) in spite of the many hurdles placed in my way by the hopeless Choose and Book system but I hate to think how someone with, say, poor English or someone who's feeling iller than I am would have got on.
Dear JD,
it is equally nonfunctional from the hospital end. I have to rebook about 30% of patients to other clinics. This isn't the fault of the GPs, the patient or the booking rules it is the fault of the system. Some clinics have access to investigations and treatments that others do not, so even if 2 clinics at Borchester General Hospital have my name on them, they are not the same. If the appointment slots are full for the next six weeks then the whole clinic disappears from the system, to prevent the patients breeching. So I find myself seeing patients in my Felpersham clinic 15 miles away, agreeing that they need investigation X that is only avaliable at BGH, and booking the patient in to the clinic there, they no longer count as a breech as they have been seen, particularly if I tick the outcome box indicating treatment commenced.
The whole system is designed to break the relationship between GPs and Consultants, and the individualised relationship with the patient. There are a few refusnik GPs who have never used it and continue to make paper named referrals on all patients. I think that the Pct is hard on them financially as well as other forms of scrutiny, but there patients do get a better service. If a GP has written to me by name, rather than a "dear Dr" letter then I always see them personally, and write back to the referring Dr (rather than the default process of the letter going to the senior partner, as individual GP lists are another way of maintaining doctor-patient relationships, and another victim of new labour).
I share your contempt of Choose and Book, another way the government has squandered money, grown beaurocracy, damaged doctor patient relationships, and generated patient complaints. Very New Labour!
I am not a great fan of the current government, but the last one was so awful that it had to go. Mr Miliband seems to want to restart with a blank sheet of paper. Scrapping the daft and counterproductive IT systems in health would be a good start, but re-establishing political and economic credibility will take a generation for Labour. If Gordon Brown had won the election in May, with or without the Liberals, we would have an Irish type crisis here with the IMF's slash and burn financial policies, making the public sector misery of the next few years exponentially worse.
The NHS Trust, in whose area I live, apparently has no facilities for open heart surgery, and all patients in this area have to go to a London NHS hospital. There in a far nearer hospital in the adjoining NHS trust, one of the pioneering hospitals, but our NHS Trust doesn't have a contract with them, so where's the choice?
And remember that there is no smooth running organisation which can't be fouled up at enormous cost by a computer. Our surgery is typical; when appointments were made in a book, you could be "squeezed in " if the receptionist knew it was something simple like a prescription renewal, or extended if she knew that your visit would probably take longer than average. Now we are all equal - isn't that the objective of socialism!
fascinating
http://bmabmjfiles.blogspot.com/
I find the system a pointless waste of time and resource, I have had 3 hospital appointments this year each requesting me to choose a hospital and day and time and each time has then been cancelled due to problems with dates for consultants, another bundle of pamphlets then appear on my doorstep telling me to repeat the booking process, waste of millions
Post a Comment