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Before you go down the road of asking individual patients to pay, please stop wasting money on non-clinical matters and the assiciated staff.
When I worked in Group 20 Hospital Management Committee (early 1960s), there was a hospital secretary and he had a secretary. Then there was a young girl (scarcely out of her teens) in the office.
We, the junior doctors, did the ICD coding, wrote the discharge letters for inpatients.
There were NO irrelevant data collection systems. Your marital status was recorded. Ah. The religion too. But the poor sister was flumoxed when you, the patient said “no religion”. She decided to record Free Church (I suppose she guessed that I was a free spirit).
Assuming someone says he is a gay. What does it matter? He might be closet heterosexual. Or, as the sociologists will say, bisexual. Bisexual is a biological term meaning the animal possesses male and female gonads at the same time. But, do our data collectors, processors care? No. But all this data, grist to the computer mill, swallows pounds sterling.
When I was young, you could go to the hospital. The porter on duty would point you to the right direction. And if he did not know, he would ask the hospital secretary’s secretary. Somewhere in England there is a brand new hospital (which has FEWER beds) than the hospitals it replaced and a larger population.
There are no porters as far as I can see. There are a couple of staff at the reception desk. Genuinely busy. A volunteer very kindly comes along and asks if she could help. I say I would like to deliver a letter to the manager. Why? Is it complaint? I do not want to tell her. Oh then go to PALS. They will help you. Three I go. Thank heavens for PALS. I tell PALS that the letter contains a complaint - about the NHS having become so complicated that I, senile like many thousand others, cannot cope and I have to ask PALS to help me negotiate through the maze - as they have helped me to do many times. So, the letter contains THANKS too, to the PALS.
I suggest the NHS be simplified to look like and work like what it was fifty, sixty years ago.
No more money needed. Redeploy staff.
Re: The NHS at 80? How it might look in 2028
This is a reponse to Dr Ken Leeper’s comments.
Before you go down the road of asking individual patients to pay, please stop wasting money on non-clinical matters and the assiciated staff.
When I worked in Group 20 Hospital Management Committee (early 1960s), there was a hospital secretary and he had a secretary. Then there was a young girl (scarcely out of her teens) in the office.
We, the junior doctors, did the ICD coding, wrote the discharge letters for inpatients.
There were NO irrelevant data collection systems. Your marital status was recorded. Ah. The religion too. But the poor sister was flumoxed when you, the patient said “no religion”. She decided to record Free Church (I suppose she guessed that I was a free spirit).
Assuming someone says he is a gay. What does it matter? He might be closet heterosexual. Or, as the sociologists will say, bisexual. Bisexual is a biological term meaning the animal possesses male and female gonads at the same time. But, do our data collectors, processors care? No. But all this data, grist to the computer mill, swallows pounds sterling.
When I was young, you could go to the hospital. The porter on duty would point you to the right direction. And if he did not know, he would ask the hospital secretary’s secretary. Somewhere in England there is a brand new hospital (which has FEWER beds) than the hospitals it replaced and a larger population.
There are no porters as far as I can see. There are a couple of staff at the reception desk. Genuinely busy. A volunteer very kindly comes along and asks if she could help. I say I would like to deliver a letter to the manager. Why? Is it complaint? I do not want to tell her. Oh then go to PALS. They will help you. Three I go. Thank heavens for PALS. I tell PALS that the letter contains a complaint - about the NHS having become so complicated that I, senile like many thousand others, cannot cope and I have to ask PALS to help me negotiate through the maze - as they have helped me to do many times. So, the letter contains THANKS too, to the PALS.
I suggest the NHS be simplified to look like and work like what it was fifty, sixty years ago.
No more money needed. Redeploy staff.
Competing interests: No competing interests