Re: OT: hospital price disclosure

for my last appointment

the SMS confirmation arrived two days after the appointment

tim

Emails are not secure, unlike FAX machines, and the main users of the NHS, 12 million pensioners, don't even kowo how to use a computer securely - witness the number of people who still keep falling for the "you account shows unusual activity, you must move your money to a 'safe account' ".

Quite. Yet plenty still shout about cutting the NHS admin side and spending the money on nurses, etc. Who would then be nursing patients who hadn't turned up. ;-)

Err, why would an email confirming an appointment and giving the details you need for it have to be 'secure'?

BTW, you think pensioners more likely to be taken in by a phishing email? Be good to see your proof.

They also have to spend an inordinate amount of time shuffling elderly patients around who are ready to be discharged but have no safe place to go to (awaiting a space in a private nursing home run at 100% capacity).

Some of their IT systems are a bit antiquated.

The one I have noticed for the central printing of appointment letters is that the postcode is printed 1.2 cm too low for the window envelopes they are now using which means that it isn't visible if the letter is folded in the normal way. I don't know if that only affects North Yorkshire NHS letters or whether it is a national "feature". The only ones where it was right had been refolded with 1.2cm lopped off the top.

It can delay delivery beyond the normal second class service if the post code and in some cases parts of the post town is obscured. I'd be interested to know it this problem is more widespread - please check.

It also struck me that my NHS dentist sends me a reminder text the day before a trivial 15 minute routine checkup appointment whereas going into hospital for a procedure that ties up an operating theatre, anaesthetist, surgeon and their supporting staff for hours there is no such reminder sent.

Never had the appointment letter delayed so long that it arrived after the event. But they do seem to use the slowest possible mailing service (although not quite as slow as the one used by HMRC who I suspect batch process accumulated post by region fortnightly or something).

Our local hospital has an automated call system that calls about 5 days before that reminds you of your appointment and asks for you to press "1" to confirm attendance and "2" to cancel the appointment. The damned thing really pissed me off. It phoned me on a Friday night, about an appointment to get some test results the next week. At the time I did not know whether I could attend or not, as my workplace wanted me to go on a course that morning and the course would not be repeated for three months, however, there might not have been any spaces on it. I needed an option to say that I was unsure, but there wasn't one. So the damned thing kept ringing me every hour, every day, between 8 am and 9pm until I could answer the question on the Monday!

We've had numerous appointment letters fail to arrive at all and we've only known about them because we've had an automated call - or twice when that hasn't been set up, a missed appointment letter.

We've also recently had a letter arrive on a Saturday, cancelling the appointment on Wednesday. I re-arranged my whole week. Then on Tuesday I phoned to see when the rearranged appointment was, only to be told that Wednesday's hadn't been cancelled! They had no idea how the letter had been produced, as they are automated and triggered by the cancellation! That meant me losing an afternoon's pay as I couldn't rearrange my hours again at such short notice.

SteveW