It All Makes Work For The Working Man to Do

"crun must have jumped through a fair few hoops!"

You're not kidding. The first ploy they try is to ignore your letters until they're sent by recorded delivery, but the real hurdle is the expense, it's cost me £161 and counting so far:

Surgery: £50 (on top of the £35 ten years ago)
General hospital: £50
Heart hospital: £31
Ambulance service: £30
Community hospital: They're still ignoring my communications.
Mental health: I've been trying to get those for 18 years.

When I queried why the ECGs were missing from my ambulance records I was told that they've been filed in an archive that it's not possible to retrieve them from. I've got one of those, it's called a dustbin.

I've found the proof that they knew I had a heart arrhythmia, and that they spent 11 months denying it, but the letter that would explain why has been withheld, along with a lot of others.

'who reads these notes' easy the CQC, lawyers and coroners!!

Having sorted through the rest of the pile it turns out that the older records are just as voluminous, I hadn't found them as they'd been shuffled like a pack of cards.

I was going to question the sense of including pages and pages of blank unused forms, but I see now that the originals are in booklet form.

When I was in to have my wisdom teeth out 17 years ago they produced a record with comments like this:

Problem: .............has been admitted for surgery.
Aim for ............ to be prepared physically and psychologically.
Welcome ...........to the ward.
Ensure that ................ is seen by an anaesthetist.

It goes on like that for four pages, and on each dotted line somebody has had to write my name in by hand. That's a total of 31 times. I don't know how long it took them to scrap that idea, but there aren't any more of them.

Definitely a case of them covering their backs. What a shame that it's come to this. Time completing paperwork could be far better used.

Well crun anyway! Its all a result of our litigious culture. Everything has to be recorded. Its not easy to get access to your own medical notes. crun must have jumped through a fair few hoops! I'd rather not see mine!

Seems to me that the NHs need to spend less time on paperwork and more time on care - who reads these notes I wonder?