It's a good job neither of us are ill

 I was reading The Daily Sceptic recently and came across the following comment, from a reader who styles themself ‘Karenovirus’:

The other day I was watching Michael Palin's travelogue Pole to Pole; in episode 3 he is in Leningrad trying to buy some vodka. Someone explains that first he must obtain a ‘kiewpon’ from the Casa Kiosk (I had witnessed similar in restaurants in Kiev and Odessa a decade previously).

Fortunately for Michael a passerby sells him a coupon (in the way that someone might illegally pass you a parking permit with some time left on) and nobody else batted an eyelid.

This might seem like a minor transgression but it actually struck at the heart of the Soviet system in which full employment was achieved by having three people to do one person's job.

Reading it, I realised that life in the UK is now almost as absurd as it was under the Soviet system. Parts of our national infrastructure are supported by teams of people that, well, seem to need to pass you to another team, if only to ensure that both teams are really busy, if not short staffed, and fully able to justify their supposedly gainful employment.

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Viv’s driving licence expired in June. She’s not permitted to drive, but this did mean that we had to contact the DVLA; we have never received a letter from them confirming her being prohibited from driving, or the reasons why - which we’d need to get certain minor benefits, like a disabled bus pass - so I did what I thought I was obliged to do and contacted them.

They confirmed that she was not allowed to drive, but they gave a medical reason that I did not believe to be correct. Concerned that this might cause problems should she ever wish to drive again, and aware that the DVLA are subject to data protection legislation just like the rest of us (i.e. the data they store must be accurate), I phoned the DVLA and told them of their error and asked what they required to correct their records. 

‘You’ll need a letter from your doctor’, they informed me, as if it was our problem that their data was inaccurate. (Not we’ll need, but you’ll need.)

So, in mid-July, we mentioned this on a call with a GP.

‘You’ll need to write to your named doctor and request a letter confirming your medical condition’, the locum GP told us. Again, it was our problem.

We wrote to our GP, requesting a letter:

I had an appointment with one of your colleagues last Monday in which I discussed issues that have affected me in recent months, and which, I understand, mean that I am medically unfit to drive.

I mentioned to your colleague that I have had communications from DVLA regarding driving.... I would like to set the record straight with DVLA; I believe it is important that their records are accurate. 

Would it be possible please for you to provide me with a letter confirming the conditions from which I suffer that make me medically unfit to drive, and, if possible, what criteria I would need to satisfy that would make me eligible to drive? 

I understand that a fee may be payable for this, which I am happy to consider. 

Thank you.

Three weeks later a secretary contacted us to say that a fee was required; we wrote out a cheque and took it along to the surgery. This was cashed on August 6th - that’s over three months before the date I wrote this.

Two weeks after the secretary called us we hadn’t heard anything; I’d assumed that the letter had been drafted when they asked for the money, so we called the surgery, only to be told, no, the letter wasn’t ready, they would contact us when it was.

At the beginning of September we received a copy of a letter from Viv’s neurologist to the GP. The GP had clearly been in touch with the consultant regarding Viv’s condition; the consultant replied to him that yes, we had been correct in saying that the DVLA’s records were wrong, and he outlined his opinion as to what the DVLA should have recorded, in his area of specialisation.

A week or so later Viv received a text message from the surgery. She’s not very good at texts - one of the symptoms of her condition, strangely - so handed her phone to me. The text appeared to say that the GP wasn’t going to produce the letter we had requested, and paid for, because he felt he couldn’t add anything to what the consultant had said.

This left us with a problem. You can’t print off a text message and show it as evidence of eligibility for a bus pass, or send it to the DVLA; also, the specialist's letter did not say that the condition he had listed was the only condition - which is what we felt we needed to have to get the DVLA to make its records fully accurate. 

So, we called the surgery and spoke to a secretary. She looked things up on her computer, and told us that, yes, she understood what we wanted, but we’d have to talk to the doctor, and that would require having an appointment with him; to get an appointment, we’d have to phone the surgery at 8am in the morning. This was the same time when people who were ill would be calling to request an appointment; there was no means of arranging an appointment for an ‘administrative’, rather than medical, issue. We wouldn’t be given a time that the doctor would call us, he would just call us when he was ready, and we would have to be able to talk to him then.

That was perhaps seven weeks ago. The only day that is convenient for us to stay in and wait for a call from a doctor is Monday; on other days we have things to do like shopping (for food, not luxuries), or our volunteering job, gardening at the local big house.

Every Monday since then we have tried to arrange an appointment. On most occasions we have simply failed to get through, the surgery's phone system returning the ‘number unobtainable’ tone in response to our calling them. On a couple of occasions we have managed to get through, only to be told there weren’t any appointments left with the doctor we need to speak to.

We’re not the only ones receiving such treatment. The local paper ran a story a couple of weeks ago about the numbers of people going to the local A&E because they can’t get an appointment with a GP; our cleaner told us of one, a mother of two boys, both of whom developed nasty coughs. She couldn’t get hold of the GP so took them to A&E - at a time when the hospitals are, according to the leaders of ‘our’ NHS, under exceptional strain.

I have to be convinced that our doctor is under exceptional strain. He only works two or three days a week at the surgery, we’ve been told. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever actually met him, or spoken to him. For all I know he may even be a fantasy, invented just to defraud the incompetent NHS bureacracy of a six figure salary every year. He certainly hasn’t done very much for Viv or me.

We did speak, face-to-face, to a receptionist at our GP’s surgery the other day, when we dropped off a prescription request. We told her of the problems we were having getting through on the phone. 

‘You’ll just have to keep on trying’, was all she could offer by way of advice.

‘It’s a good job neither of us are seriously ill’, I remarked. She seemed unmoved by this; it seemed that it was our problem that we couldn’t get through. To me, it seemed she felt she was doing her job, and if anyone had a problem it wasn’t her fault. Taking ownership of an issue is clearly something that is not expected of employees within ‘our’ NHS.

We’ll keep on trying to arrange an appointment to see how long it actually takes to get one and to get this relatively trivial matter resolved.  One arm of the state - the DVLA - has incorrect data, and needs us to get information to prove its accuracy (why can’t it just request information directly from the GP?) from another arm of the state - the NHS. The pair of them seem to take great pleasure in palming us off with excuses for their own incompetence and repeatedly fail to take responsibility for an issue which should be easy to resolve.

The GP surgery apparently blames BT for their phone problems, but will only allow bookings by phone. They don’t seem to accept that they have a duty to facilitate their registered patients accessing primary care services. 

Just like in the old Eastern Bloc, you are passed from pillar to post, asked for your money, and then given one excuse after another why you’re not provided with what you think you’ve paid for. As I said to the receptionist, ‘it’s a good job neither of us are seriously ill’.

That’s the sort of thing they used to say in Soviet Russia, circa 1980, as Michael Palin experienced. In our case, the people needed to resolve a one-word data error at the DVLA included the clerk there, the GP, the consultant at the hospital, the GP receptionist, and the GP secretary and no doubt the consultant’s secretary: all on the state payroll. I’m sure they’ll find a few more friends to keep busy on this trivial administrative task before we’re done. And, of course, I have yet to find out whether I can reclaim the fee for the GP from the DVLA, for correcting a fault in their data.

I’m also inclined to wonder why the GP needed to contact the consultant; isn’t the point of having an NHS GP that you have someone who knows what is wrong with you? Or are the DVLA wrong in their expectation of a GP? 

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A German friend of mine told me how they observe the British worship of ‘our wonderful’ NHS with amazement, and some concern. The first and last letters - NS - mean something very sinister to them, and should do to us, for the British soul appears to be disappearing into a bureaucratic, totalitarian whirlpool, and it is by a population becoming hypnotised by false promises that unpleasant regimes, like that of Herr Hitler, take hold.