New NHS System

[SallyAnne]

I've probably missed something, but I thought the NHS had spent millions on this new patient booking system? Where you can choose your own appointment at your nearest clinic etc?

I've had some wierd skin allergy thing (very sexy) for the last few weeks and I've been waiting for login details to come.
So I got them yesterday (after about 9 days).

You log in with a reference number, the password provided and your year of birth.

It TOLD me what clinic I had to go to (no choice), and then I had to click on a button to "Choose and Book" appointment....

This directed me to the phone number of the clinic!


So I've waited 10 days to be given a phone number.

Genius

[DimPrawn]

I've probably missed something, but I thought the NHS had spent millions on this new patient booking system? Where you can choose your own appointment at your nearest clinic etc?

:

billions


Lets see. Who runs the NHS? The government.

Who is the government? New Labour.

You get what you vote for.

[Platypus]

Actually the GP system works quite well where I live, online you can choose which doc and what time. So all the millions were worth it to replace the old system where you phoned up and chose which doc and what time.

[Mich the Tester]

Any second rate, no sorry tenth rate tester would have discovered this and reported it only to be told ‘works as designed’ which is the standard answer of any software producer when their product turns out to be tulipe.

Software houses don’t test. They produce tulipe and then throw it over the wall for their customers to carry the costs. When the customers are power-crazed, ignorant and in charge of huge sums of public money, what do you expect?

[expat]

....
It TOLD me what clinic I had to go to (no choice), and then I had to click on a button to "Choose and Book" appointment....

This directed me to the phone number of the clinic!


So I've waited 10 days to be given a phone number.

Genius

Possibly:

1. you weren't offered a choice because there is no choice.
2. you got only a phone no, not an online appointment, because the clinic has so far failed to join the Choose and Book system fully.

It still looks duff but not as bad as you're making out. That would be just a bad presentation of this particular situation, not a system that doesn't work.

[minestrone]

Her indoors is a GP, they totally hate the new system, hate the way stuff is forced on them. But they don't protest too much because labour pretty much doubled their wages.

Really the system was not that bad before. Doctor decides that you need to see a specialist, doctor contacts specialist to get time, doctor tells patient when to go. Now it's a billion quid booking system when the NHS can't afford cancer drugs.

Hey, that's labour.

[Mich the Tester]

Possibly:

1. you weren't offered a choice because there is no choice.
2. you got only a phone no, not an online appointment, because the clinic has so far failed to join the Choose and Book system fully.

It still looks duff but not as bad as you're making out. That would be just a bad presentation of this particular situation, not a system that doesn't work.

Either you're being very charitable about this or you wrote the code.

[Mich the Tester]

Her indoors is a GP, they totally hate the new system, hate the way stuff is forced on them. But they don't protest too much because labour pretty much doubled their wages.

Really the system was not that bad before. Doctor decides that you need to see a specialist, doctor contacts specialist to get time, doctor tells patient when to go. Now it's a billion quid booking system when the NHS can't afford cancer drugs.

Hey, that's labour.

> 20 billion quid

[expat]

Her indoors is a GP, they totally hate the new system, hate the way stuff is forced on them. But they don't protest too much because labour pretty much doubled their wages.

Really the system was not that bad before. Doctor decides that you need to see a specialist, doctor contacts specialist to get time, doctor tells patient when to go. Now it's a billion quid booking system when the NHS can't afford cancer drugs.

Hey, that's labour.

Price is one issue, but ISTM that the problem with that is consultancies on a gravy train, and the Tories were no better, except possibly in that, by not trying to do so much, they didn't fail so much.

Whether an online booking and management system would be better than the manual system is another question: I think the answer is yes.

Certainly I have long since tired of explaining to medical receptionists that I work out of the country, my ideal appointement would be at the weekend but failing that I want to mimimise the time off work, for example by having the last appointment on a Friday, or having one at the start or end of a Mon or Fri with a lot of notice so that I can plan to do several things in an unpaid day off, especially if poss see the consultant in the morning and then follow-up with the GP in the same afternoon; but at any rate it is more important to me to get a less inconvenient and costly appointement than to have one soon etc etc etc ..... only to be asked brightly, "so is Wednesday 20th at 11:30 OK for you then?"

As for cancer drugs, the NHS can't afford them no matter what it does. It could afford more if they had fewer expensive IT projects. It could also afford more if taxes were increased. You pays your money ....

[expat]

Either you're being very charitable about this or you wrote the code.

I see so much bad code that I automatically work out how bad something is. This might be only as bad as my online banking making me choose which account, when I only have one. It's inelegant but I know that it happens because I might have more than one.

It is IMHO not as bad as Windows giving you a fatal error message in a dialog box with only one button, "OK".