So I drive 7 miles to the Clinic to pick up a prescription, only to find that it's early closing day. For staff training.
¿Que? (That's Spanish for WTF?)Is it too much to expect the place to be open normal business hours as a minimum? I would have expected "staff training" to be accomplished by staff arriving early or leaving late. After all, if Tesco can do it, why can't the NHS?
Apparently the RNIB have similar things, or so a friend told me after going all the way to London only to find the critical people were all away training. Training for what? Nobody quite knew... Brian
I get slightly perturbed when the local GP surgery tells us that it won't be possible to make any appointments on a given day next week because their computer systems were being upgraded. When I was a lad (& doing such things as computer upgrades), we did them outside office hours so as not to disrupt service. I suppose it would cost the surgery a little bit more to pay for out-of-hours upgrade, but then I remember how much a GP gets paid, and wonder who should be inconvenienced: the poor, the sick, the elderly (most of the users of the GP surgery) or the GP salary...
When I did the VMWare migration at our work (>100 VMs that had to be moved by hand as the old system was too shot to do anything clever) I elected to work nights. For no extra money (though it did avoid paying for the train for 2 weeks).
I did this as it was easier that managing 100+ sets of notifications for downtime, re-notifications when stuff slipped plus it would have stopped lots of people working.
So I generally regard outfits that pull massive system outages in the day as a bunch of illiterate poofters who have no concept of service or contingency.
As for the GP above - print some bloody booking sheets for each GP/nurse and write appointments in by hand. FFS - is everyone now a useless hard of thinking techoslave with no common sense?
I notice my dentist still has a very large appointment book, which is filled in with a pencil, and rubbed out with a rubber when people change. Difficult to imagine anything simpler. I wonder what HMRC think though.
Chances are that the upgrade will be done outside hours. But it's best to set aside some time after the upgrade is scheduled to complete. If it goes OK then you use it for staff training (so it has to be during or just before normal office hours.) If the installation doesn't go well then you use the time to roll back to the previous version.
They probably aren't doing an upgrade of the computers.. most appear to be switching management systems. The data migration and the staff training take the time.
The "we can't book appointments" is just a copout to reduce the load on the staff. they can still print sheets and fill them in with a pen. Repeat scripts are more of a problem as it takes a long time to write one with a pen compared to printing one so don't expect them to be done for a week.
It;s the HSE that will complain. That pencil could take some buggers eye out. Far too dangerous to have such things in a dentists:-)
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