Recalling the days when I knew and trusted my doctor

IT has been a long time since I had an appointment with a doctor who I had actually met before.

I used to have a doctor who I knew and trusted, and, although he pored over my medical records on a computer screen in front of him, I like to think he knew me as well.

It put me at ease that I felt like I didn’t have to start again and explain any health issues with myself or my children. Then everything changed.

The surgery I was with was merged into a wider practice, trying to get an appointment was like trying to win the lottery, and then, during Covid, I wasn’t even allowed to set foot in the practice at all. I haven’t been back since.

Although I’ve had one telephone consultation with a doctor who was perfectly reasonable, I pretty much diagnosed myself and just asked for the prescription I knew I needed.

First I had to allow a couple of days for it to be processed. No problem. Then I had to leave 72 hours. OK, I can live with that. Then this week I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had requested a full six days before, and was told ‘Sorry, we’re asking for seven days notice these days’.

I sighed and asked if I should come back the next day. But the woman behind the counter, who was doing her best, began rummaging through a large plastic box which was on the floor and eventually came up with a packet with my name on it. I felt like I had won a prize in the tombola, let alone received some medication.

The woman in front of me in the queue wasn’t so lucky. She wasn’t there for herself but an elderly lady who was fretting as her expected delivery of tablets had not turned up and she was worried they would run out. A more senior pharmacist had taken her to one side and said that a request should have been made a full seven days before, so she would have to be patient.

Maybe that’s why people in need of treatment are called patients, as that’s exactly what you need these days. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that I remember being able to go to the doctors the same day, leave the surgery holding a prescription in my mitts, walk to the pharmacy and be told it would be 20 minutes or so.

You could even wait and get it there and then. What, exactly, has gone wrong with the medical system? Have things been run into the ground so much that we could be seeing the NHS in its death throes?

I hope not, but my head is telling me something else entirely.

It might not be a matter of life and death for me, but the elderly lady stressed out that her medication had not arrived, whatever it was, could be far more adversely affected.

Unfortunately we seem to have become a country where personal circumstances are of little matter to those in charge. Where the computer has, indeed, said no. Whether it is the postcode lottery of hospital treatments, which are well documented, to the long waits for an ambulance which are costing people their lives, the NHS is no longer fit for purpose.

Yet what can we expect when we have a Government which is so inept that the idea of cutting taxes for those earning over £150k would seem like a good idea?

A petition urging for a General Election to be called reached more than 425,000 signatures this week, more than four times the amount which is required for it to be debated in Parliament.

But will there be an election? Of course not.

So hold on, as we have two more years of this before we are allowed to have our say and enact change.