Day 7: Only six days after my GP referred me for a nasty lump, Fastrack's Rapid Diagnostic Unit subjected me to a battery of tests, and by the end of the day came up with a not very nice interim diagnosis and a date five days later for confirming the test results.
The efficiency of it all astounded me. It was quite different from the treatment of most of my contemporaries, which goes like this: GP visit; referral to hospital consultant after one month; call for test after a further two weeks if you are lucky; further appointment with consultant after another month.
Then maybe they didn't find the cause, so there was: a call for more tests after two more weeks; referral to a different consultant after another month; two weeks to more tests; call from hospital for emergency admission. By now, I suspect it is too late. This is happening right now to one mate, not out in the boondocks but in the glossiest newest hospital in central London.
One thing did seem less than efficient at Fastrack: the recording of my data, which seemed to be done entirely on paper. First, I had to fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. Then a series of doctors asked me all the same questions all over again, each filling out a differently formatted form.
Now, I can see that asking a patient questions is necessary to build up a rapport and learn a lot about the patient, but there is a threshold after which the patient gets irritated, and starts questioning the intelligence of the doctor. My threshold is very low.
The result of all this is inches of paper, which have to be riffled through, can be contradictory, and go missing. Surely, it was these piles of paper which in 2002 Richard Granger vowed to eliminate from the NHS by spending billions on what was laughingly called Connecting for Health. Yet, here we are seven years later, and paper still seems to be embedded in the genes of the medical profession, even in a model hospital like Fastrack.
I did grumble about this to one of the consultants, and he said the real patient records were indeed safely and efficiently housed in computers. I have since confirmed that this is so. But, he claimed, all the stuff had to be on paper as well, because of legal requirements.
To me, this is nonsense, because my GP runs a completely paperless surgery. He seems to have no legal difficulties in keying all my data straight into my record on his computer.
I suspect that hospital doctors are putting up a luddite smokescreen, while armies of clerks are condemned to transcribe their badly written notes onto computers in perpetuity. That is kind of expensive.
To be continued…
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