Face to face with the NHS

I really do worry about the right-wing idealogues in the Coalition which seem intent on changing our health service and our education systems for the worse and irretrievably so. There’s a good article (click here) in the Observer about it today. These guys say it’s about choice. Rubbish.

In Cambridge we’re lucky. In respect of most things but including health care. In South Cambs we are measured as having well above average health anyway and although Addenbrookes may not be the friendliest hospital it is good. And this week I, or to be more precise, my wife, came face to face with the NHS in the persona of Addenbrookes.

Addenbrookes of course is the United Nations. I don’t know how many nationalities are employed there but it’s a lot. I worry that maybe there’s more Filipino nurses there than there are left in Manila. And there’s plenty of Brits too and given that it’s Addenbrookes I guess they’re the best.

The NHS is about waiting. Forget about the famous 18 week targets to get an appointment. That’s manageable. Once you know the day you just plan around it. The waiting I’m talking about is the waiting when you’re there. There’s no information and who knows how long you might have to wait. My wife went in for a couple of tests and ended up staying 2 nights … most of the time she was there she was just waiting.

The waiting generally is to see a doctor or to use some fancy kit. And the idea is that if people wait for them then they can be utilised most efficiently . Fair enough. But what is frustrating is not the waiting per se but the lack of information about how long you’re going have to wait. It’s like waiting for the gas man to turn up or for Comet to make a delivery when all it can tell you is the day (although they’re generally better now and tell you whether it’s before or after lunch).

If the doctor is a scarce resource he or she surely has a program to which he or she works. In which case can’t this be visible? Can’t some smart NHS system allow a doctor to be ‘tracked’ like a parcel at FedEx. Then the patient would know that it had time to do something else in the meantime instead of waiting in anticipation and thinking that every approaching set of footsteps is the doctor.

That’s half of the waiting problem. The other is another scarce resource. The hospital bed. Patients wait on beds and as long as one is occupied it’s blocked. Thus comparatively healthy waiting patients are blocking beds for other patients who might have more need of them. I don’t have a simple solution to that one except to point out that the absence of information for my wife turned her from an out-patient into an in-patient and that’s what ended up blocking the bed for 2 nights.

The people who work at Addenbrookes are first class, the facilities are first class and the technology and methods are first class. Neither I nor my wife can complain. But as we all know there are inefficiencies buried in the system which need to be driven out. But the way to do that is not to privatise but to employ the best people and give them a mission.