The Envy of the World ...?

 (Written in October 2022)

In the 1990s I worked for a software company, which was based in the US. I worked out of Maidenhead, supporting customers in the UK, Scandinavia, Ireland, and, for some products, other parts of Europe.

Having a bit of german on my CV, I was first in line when our colleagues in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, needed a bit of help. The guy I dealt with there wasn’t actually German, er war Ungar - Hungarian. He spoke good english, and we had a few chats on social matters - one of which, of course, was the amount of change he had seen in the preceding decade - he’d been living in Hungary, under Communist rule, for all his life before moving to Germany in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One thing he spoke about at length was the way the Communist authorities lied to the people. ‘The shelves were empty, everywhere there were queues, but the people were told that our system was world-beating, that it was better than anything in the west’, he would say.

Sounds strangely like what we’re told about ‘our NHS’.

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I’ve just got back from the pharmacy, after collecting a prescription item for Viv. There was a long queue, the supposedly simple process took about twenty minutes - a good part of which was taken up by the assistant flicking through paper copies of prescriptions, and going off to find the relevant package for a customer. Would a bank or another large business rely on paper files in this day and age? Can you imagine going into your bank to withdraw some money and watching the assistant flick through a paper file to locate your records?

Do you really think that a visitor from overseas who saw this process in action would be envious of our healthcare system?

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It's not as if this was the only example of poor use of professionals’, and my, time in this transaction.

I carry some special medication with me to administer to Viv in the event of her having a serious seizure. My current supply of this expires at the end of September, so, in the September repeat prescription request, I asked for a new supply.

Mid-September I collected the prescription from the pharmacy. The package for the special medication did not look right to me, so I took some photos of it and emailed them to the epilepsy nurse at the local hospital asking for her advice.

It was wrong, she said, I should return to the pharmacy and point out the problem.

I took it to the pharmacy, they checked, but said they couldn’t change it, for they had issued what was prescribed. It was the prescription that was wrong.

I took it to the GP surgery, complete with a letter from the consultant at the hospital that explained what medication I should be carrying. The ladies in the dispensary agreed that I had been given the wrong stuff. The relevant doctor would be in the following Wednesday, they would check with him and get a corrected prescription.

A week later I checked again with the GP surgery. The GP had not responded to the request from the ladies in the dispensary.

A further week later, I checked with the surgery again, by phone, having to try several times because the line was engaged. The new prescription had been issued, they told me, it was ready for collection at the pharmacy. I did wonder why we hadn’t just been told this, rather than try our luck at the lottery of getting through on the phone.

So I visited the pharmacy to collect the item. Just to be sure, I opened it there, and, to my amazement the same mistake had been made; the box was identical to the one I had photographed for the epilepsy nurse! I discussed the matter with the pharmacist, eventually he agreed there had been a mistake. The correct medication would be available to collect the next day.

So, we finally collected it today, after four trips to, and some lengthy waits at, the pharmacy, an email exchange with a hospital nurse, a trip to our GP surgery, and two successful (and countless unsuccessful) attempts to get through to someone at the surgery by phone. That’s for one prescription item.

Is this really an example of an organisation that is ‘the envy of the world’?

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Judging by the aforementioned queues in the pharmacy, the majority of customers of the NHS are over 50. Is it wholly a coincidence that a recent ONS study showed that there are huge numbers of economically inactive (i.e. not employed, but not officially unemployed) individuals in the 50-65 age group; this in a society where there is a shortage of workers?

Is there any analysis of how many of these are people that are affected by a chronic condition, or perhaps are carers? Official statistics will exclude those who aren’t claiming relevant benefits.

Shouldn’t the NHS be focussing on getting people fit so they can work, and on its staff being as productive as possible? Shouldn't our MPs be demanding that the publicly funded health service, which risks bankrupting the nation, is more efficient?

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As if the above wasn’t enough, a few days later Viv had to ‘request a prescription review’. This is needed every six months or so, in theory the doctors check the prescription to see if it’s necessary. 

The review in this case was for her anti-epilepsy medication, which is prescribed on behalf of the hospital consultant: she mustn’t stop taking it. 

We spent half an hour on the phone just to request them to review it, when they already knew it needed to be reviewed - it said so on her prescription! 

This process is reminiscent of those in the old Soviet block, when, if you wanted to get a train ticket somewhere, you’d have to go and get a permit from one man to allow you to go to another man to buy the ticket. It was a way of keeping many people employed.

Sounds like the NHS?