INMYVIEW... TOOMUCH BOXTICKING

WHEN I look at the way some parts of the NHS are now being run, I feel a sense of deep bewilderment.

Gone is common sense and compassion, eroded by the imposition of increasing layers of administration, so that at times it seems that the focus is not patient care any more, but box ticking.

Petty bureaucracy is playing a key part in the decline of patients’ experiences of the NHS, as the example of what recently happened to my sister-in-law demonstrates all too vividly.

A gentle, mild- mannered woman in her 40s, she has a serious rheumatic disease, a form of chronic vasculitis, which causes painful swelling and inflammation to not just multiple joints, but multiple systems including her kidneys, lungs and eyes.

Recently, she has started on an essential treatment to help alleviate the intense fatigue, pain and resulting lack of mobility her condition causes, but it has led to side-effects, including chronic daily headaches, which she quite rightly wanted to discuss with her medical team.

So she telephoned the rheumatology department of her local hospital to make an appointment to see the specialist rheumatology nurse.

The person on the phone asked for her hospital number, but she did not know it: she gave her name, date of birth, postcode, and would have been happy to provide her NHS number, passport number, tax code and car registration number. Yet she had no idea of her hospital number, no letter with it on — how, she reasoned, could she possibly provide it?

Could you check it from the computer, she asked. The response: ‘Sorry, no, I can’t — it’s a question of data protection.’ And, as a result, she was told it would not be possible to make an appointment.

It’s only through persistence that she now has one, but it’s some weeks away.

It seems to me that while patients fall sick in record numbers, the NHS is being strangled by the poison ivy of bureaucracy. The systems introduced to make the NHS more efficient have had the opposite effect. The managers should take note.