Bureaucracy is killing the NHS. 18 months ago we changed our doctors to a practice that is less than half a mile from where we live. I am on statins after my stroke and eldest daughter is on hormone replacement Therapy after a brain tumour was operated on why she was 8 years old. We have had no problem with our new G.P. prescribing repeat prescription. Last week I got a letter from the NHS clinical record ( a private outfit that the NHS have outsourced to, based in Preston), telling me that I was going to be taken off my G.P's list as I did not live in there post code despite this letter being sent to the same post code as the surgery. Phoning the practice manager regarding this matter and had to listen to a five minute diatrade from her about how useless this outfit, that is supposed to hold all our clinical records electronically on a central database, were. She had been requesting our records for over a year and they still had not responded yet this outfit knew we had changed our address, knew that our g.p. had requested our records yet still had us registered at our old surgery. Our new practice manager has had to contact our old practice in order to get them to send over their hard copies of our records instead. This outfit was given the task under a very lucrative NHS contract to store and handle all patients records but according to her are making a right kybosh of it. As I have said before, if we could strip out all the wasteful bureaucracy out of the NHS, it would be a far better service. Our local hospital has just been told it is losing stroke, maternity and children's A & E to its partner hospital, Sunderland Royal which means a 20/30 minutes ride for visitors and patients at a cost of around £25 for a taxi and don't say why not use public transport, that would mean taking two buses and almost an hour to do the 12 mile journey. Use your car, parking charges are astronomical and if you go one minute over your time, that Will be £70, thank you very much.
Rgds.
J.A.