The NHS isn’t helping itself
I need to preface this by saying that I work in an NHS hospital. While I do love the NHS and appreciate all the help I’ve had over the years – I also want to speak up for those patients who haven’t had a great experience.
I am in a privileged position, being one of the healthcare workers on the shop floor. I get to see what’s working and what isn’t. So when I’m the patient, I know what to expect and I’m prepared for the waiting times or the lack of communication.
While the bulk of our issues as an organisation come from a lack of funding, there are some obvious places we could all tighten up.
The title of this story comes from my last experience of being a day surgery patient.
I had a pre-operative assessment at my local hospital, which is still a bit of a trek from my home. I booked time off work and paid for the travel.
When I got to the appointment I was asked to pee in a pot so that my urine could be dip tested. That was it. They didn’t weight me or take my blood pressure – two things which are way more relevant to the surgery team than my creatinine levels or general urine PH.
I’d actually had multiple urine dips that year, which they could have seen the results of IF, and here’s the kicker… IF they had full access to my GP records.
NHS computer systems don’t all marry up. You can’t see recent GP notes on the hospital computers, even though the software is the same in this case.
It’s worth noting that some hospitals and GP practises use different software. But often they are the same – the information is just not shared.
So my long and costly trip was just to pee in a pot. At this stage, it was only a minor inconvenience to me.
However, hospitals in winter are rife with viruses. Two days later, it’s surgery time and I wake up feeling awful. Of course, I assume it’s low blood sugar from being nil by mouth for the anaesthetic.
On the journey to hospital, I almost pass out on the train. The intense pressure in my stomach has me in tears and I have to get off the train and take an Uber the rest of the way.
By the time I arrive at the hospital I’m in a full blown panic attack.
This is not my first surgery and I’m usually calm. At this point I don’t know what’s wrong.
While I wait to go in for my procedure, I vomit a couple of times, which is weird because I’ve only had plain water today. There is nothing in my stomach.
Long story short, the surgery was fine and I went home the same day. Still nauseous but happy from the anaesthetic.
Then my partner starts projectile vomiting. It dawns on me that my “panic attack” might me contagious.
It turned out I’d picked up norovirus, and very likely from my pre-operative pee in a pot trip, as the hospital was in a norovirus outbreak.
To me, this is a prime example of inefficiency making things worse. If the hospital could see my previous urine dip results from my GP, then I wouldn’t have needed that pre-op appointment. That would have freed up an appointment for somebody who needed it more, and spared me from exposure to a hospital virus.
I’m very lucky that virus didn’t cause my surgery to be cancelled, which in turn would have wasted a precious surgery slot.
The waiting time for these surgery slots is around 5 to 6 months. And this is the ‘good’ end of the spectrum. Bigger surgeries have much longer waiting times.
We cannot afford for there to be wasted appointments. We can’t afford to be inefficient.
Personally, I would love to see more experienced nurses on the board of directors, instead of so many management types who don’t have the shop floor experience.
We, the workers, know where the inefficiencies are. We just want to tighten some systems up so we can do a better job of working with what we have.
It’s not always just about having more money, but seeing where the money we do have is being wasted.
We don’t need to duplicate tests in hospital that GPs have already done. We do need to make better use of our manpower to work through those surgery waiting lists.
