Waiting.
A few days ago, Mark Steyn made an argument I'd not seen before:Defenders of our system often point out that America spends a higher proportion of its GDP on health care than Canada and yet has lower life expectancy. I'm not sure I quite understand the point they're making. I have employees on both sides of the border. When my assistant in New Hampshire has a doctor's appointment at 9 a.m., she's in his office by 9:07 and back in my office by 11. My assistant in Quebec, living in a jurisdiction with the lowest doctor-patient ratio in the western world, can't get a doctor's appointment, so she goes to her local CLSC at 9 a.m., and waits, and waits and waits and waits all day to be seen.
I doubt Chantal's and my loss of economic activity is factored into those health-care-as-a-proportion-of-GDP costs.
Of course it isn't. Just as the UK's various councils keep announcing that their recycling schemes are saving loads of money, because they've done calculations that assume that we, the poor bastard public, charge zero pounds per hour for our time, more and more of which is being eaten up by all the bloody rubbish-sorting we're being forced to do. But I digress.
Vic & I went to the hospital today; she had an appointment with the haematologist. Shortly after we arrived, the receptionist announced that they were running an hour late. An hour later, she announced that they were running an hour and twenty minutes late but hoped to catch up soon. How did she think they were going to catch up when they were losing twenty minutes every hour? She also announced that this was because they only had two doctors on duty and a lot of patients — i.e., it wasn't really their fault. But this wasn't A&E. Vic's appointment was given to her months in advance. What kind of crazy system manages to combine waiting lists that necessitate making appointments two or three months in advance with getting caught completely off-guard by the rush of patients turning up on a Tuesday morning? Tsk.
Then the reception was shut while the receptionists all went to lunch together. Just because they're rushed off their feet with all this work, doesn't mean they shouldn't bugger off and leave us to it, eh?
Anyway, we ended up getting out of the hospital a couple of hours later than we should have. Though, to be honest, we weren't too bothered by then, as we had the good news that Vic is finally off the Warfarin. That's pretty much the end of the awful medical saga that started over a year ago. Finally. But, as long as Vic's been on Warfarin, she's had to have her blood checked regularly, and of course the NHS will only do it during office hours, and of course they insist on doing it near her home instead of anywhere near her work, and of course they regularly run extremely late for no good reason, so she's been made extremely late for work at least every two weeks for the last four months. Her employers are good enough to give her time off for doctor's appointments — and to recognise, of course, that these particular appointments were all that allowed her to be back at work at all — but the sheer number of hours lost really was taking the piss, frankly. And it wasn't Vic taking the piss; it was the NHS.
Sometimes, some staff are just slow. But that's not usually the problem. The delay this morning, while it was a total pain in the neck, was not Dr Ong's fault. As a haematologist, she doesn't have many patients with minor unthreatening conditions, and has a lot of cancer patients. And she takes her time with them, as we'd all hope she would. We've seen her on the wards, and she is still there, talking to her patients, long after most of her colleagues have gone home. In short, she's a good doctor, doing a good job. And, where certain other doctors who shall remain nameless pending the possibility of legal action came pretty bloody close to letting Vic die a year ago, Dr Ong was one of the good ones. She did a lot to help save Vic's life, and we realised pretty quickly that, had she been consulted a few months earlier, Vic wouldn't have been in such danger in the first place.
But there's one thing Dr Ong can't do, of course. Like every other doctor in the NHS, she can't decide how long her appointments are. It's all very well for her to take time with patients who need it, but the amount of time she is allotted for each appointment is decided by some guy in Whitehall. So she's left with a choice between being punctual and sloppy or doing her job properly and running perpetually behind schedule. In the NHS, the obvious third choice — work out how long your appointments generally take and ask your secretary to arrange your diary on that basis — simply isn't allowed.
All of this would be merely very annoying if it weren't for one little detail.
Every few months, the assembled GPs of Britain put out yet another press release complaining about how some of their patients turn up late for some appointments and this just isn't on and it's terribly inconvenient and has to be stopped and patients should be charged money whenever they turn up late.
The cause of their delays may not be their fault, but their attitude to ours stinks.
The front page.