The NHS is a case study in how technology is ruining our lives
On the radio yesterday morning, the manager of a big NHS trust said the key to improving patient satisfaction is to invest more in digital technology. Just at that moment, my phone pinged with a message from our GP surgery, asking me to make an appointment for one of my children to have a vaccination.
You can’t make appointments by phone any more, so I went online. But the first stage of the online access form requires me to click on an outline of a body, to identify the location of the ailment. Since there is no option for the entire immune system, I clicked on the arm, where the jab might go. Now I had to choose from one of 60 arm-related complaints, ranging from “lumps” to “paralysis”, but no mention of vaccines. At that point I gave up and – like some kind of crazed Luddite – tried calling the surgery instead. No answer. And so, unless I can work out some other way to breach the digital fortress, no vaccine.
In case you hadn’t noticed it yet, digital technology doesn’t actually make life easier. In fact, the opposite is so much the case that it sometimes feels like a giant confidence trick. The tech companies keep promising us more speed, efficiency and convenience; we keep buying into their awful products; and then – when the app keeps glitching and the broadband doesn’t work and the website can’t answer your questions and the customer assistant is actually a bot and the simplest task has somehow become impossible to perform – we blame ourselves for being bad at tech.
It’s a form of corporate gaslighting: they are sending us mad, and then making us feel bad about it. As the Post Office scandal so painfully demonstrated, “human error” is not always to blame. Many, if not most, of the computer systems on which we now depend are unreliable, badly designed and prone to random malfunctions. Earlier this month, British Gas customers were woken at 3am by a phone call from an automated voice asking: “How did we do?” Since a phone call in the middle of the night usually means someone has died, this caused panic. What British Gas describes blandly as a “technical issue” feels symbolic of the casual rudeness of the flawed algorithm.
Computers can make companies more “efficient” by reducing the need to employ humans. But the cost of that saving is too often transferred to the consumer, who now has to contend with a chatbot instead of a knowledgeable employee. My husband spent an entire working day this week trying to order a basic piece of kit from our broadband provider – and he is a computer nerd who studied Physics at Oxford. How is anyone less digitally-capable – the elderly, partiallysighted, learning disabled or just old-fashioned – supposed to manage?
It would be one thing if the benefits of tech were so overwhelmingly wonderful as to balance out the bad stuff. But what, really, is easier now than 40 years ago? Watching cat videos, getting junk food delivered to your door, starting culture wars and destroying the mental health of a generation. Does that seem a fair exchange?
I’ll tell you what would restore my faith in the NHS: considerably less digital technology. In an ideal world, there might even be real humans answering the phones, listening to patients and organising appointments. I think they used to be called receptionists.