In an age where technology promises efficiency and streamlined processes, my recent encounter with the NHS’s approach to handling medical cases paints a different picture – one of inefficiency and frustration, symptomatic of deeper systemic issues.
On December 9th, I went to the gym and had a routine session, and nothing seemed untoward at the time, but the next day I found myself in excruciating pain. My arm was immobile, my neck stiff, and I experienced shooting pains and tingling sensations.
The following day, I went to my (private) osteopath and after manipulating my neck he mentioned he’d seen these symptoms many times before and that it was almost certainly a slipped disc. He then recommended I get an MRI scan.
Knowing the challenges of securing a GP appointment by telephone, I physically visited the surgery on December 12th and was pleasantly surprised to schedule an appointment for December 14th.
Understanding the severity of my condition, my GP booked an MRI scan, assuring me of a text within two weeks for confirmation.
However, instead of an appointment by text, on December 26th (a full two weeks after visiting my GP) I received a perplexing message about a “physiotherapy referral” and a link to complete a digital assessment via Phio, an NHS automated chatbot.
This process took an agonising 40 minutes with a myriad of questions and instructional videos of how to move my arm to test symptoms and seemed utterly pointless since an MRI was already deemed necessary by my GP. The questions seemed to go on forever and eventually (40 minutes in), I started putting quick answers in just to get it done. I suspect many other people will do the same thing, having lost the will to live halfway through the process.
The next day, I received a call from NHS Physiotherapy to book a telephone appointment – not for the MRI, but to speak to a physiotherapist first. When I asked why I needed to talk to a physiotherapist, explaining that I thought the whole process was about scheduling an MRI, I was told I had to speak to a Physiotherapist first.
They then booked this appointment for January 9th, 2024, adding another pointless layer to an already convoluted process. It’s a baffling cycle: a phone call to expect another phone call, where I will probably have to go through my symptoms again, even though I’ve already communicated to my GP and through the digital assessment.
In my view, This experience highlights a glaring irony. The NHS, in an attempt to integrate technology for efficiency, has created a labyrinthine process that delays treatment and adds unnecessary steps. The question arises: Why involve a physiotherapist when my GP has already prescribed an MRI? Why are multiple calls and assessments needed when the path should be straightforward?
Someone calling me to tell me to expect another phone call seemed incredibly wasteful and counter-productive – it makes no sense.
This is about more than just a failed attempt at using technology efficiently. It reflects a systemic issue within the NHS – where attempts to save costs lead to more wastage, both in terms of resources and patient time. The NHS’s investment in this software, presumably running into millions, seems to have backfired, adding layers of bureaucracy instead of cutting through it.
My story is one of many where patients are caught in the crosshairs of inefficient systems masquerading as technological advances. It’s high time the NHS re-evaluated its approach, focusing on actual efficiency and patient care rather than overcomplicated processes that serve no one.
Shane McEvoy runs Flycast Media, a specialist digital marketing agency in London.
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In 2020 (pre-COVID) I was suffering from seriously strange symptoms apparently caused by taking paracetamol for weeks on end while trying to secure a (privately-paid(!)) appointment for getting a broken tooth pulled (ancillary NHS procedures managed to stall that for about two months despite it was a private dentist). My heart-rate (and presumably, blood pressure) shot up to insanely high levels causing shivers all over my body, heavy outbursts of sweating and a tremendous feeling of unrest. I managed to secure an emergency appointment with my GP where a doctor presribed beta-blockers against this and codine painkillers against the pain in my tooth. I was told that I should take two of the beta blocker pills each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. This would improve things but the outcome wasn’t good enough. Hence, I desired to question someone from the NHS if it was also ok to take three of the bb pills. As this didn’t seem like an emergency issue, I called 111. Instead of letting me ask the question I wanted to ask, I was ordered to give a description of symptoms. I managed a single sentence: “I’m having trouble with getting terribly agitated sometimes”, this referring to the already described symptoms. The guy then interrupted me and walked me through an endless script apparently supposed to enable to detect if someone was having a serious psychotic episode and about to go onto a mass killing spree. Having thus duly ascertained that this wasn’t the case, I was finally allowed to ask my question about the pills. The answer was “You’ll need to ask your GP about that, we’re not qualified to give medical advice.”
…
If my car had a problem, I would want to take it to a master mechanic to diagnose the problem, who would then pass it to a junior mechanic to do whatever, lets say change the alternator. I wouldn’t want to give it to the junior and let him hear my story 10 times until I got to the guy who actually knew what it was and what to do.
This obsession with triaging, and triaging patients, and having them seen by juniors, by practice nurses, or nurse practitioners as a way of maybe fixing the problem without it going in front of a GP or an acute specialist is half the problem in my eyes. 111, who have two potential outcomes, 1. Make an appointment with your GP, or 2. Go to A&E, and just a phenomenal waste of time and money. By the time you do actually get to see a clinician, your condition has undoubtedly worsened.
I’d be in favour of Minor Injuries and Acute centres attached to hospitals, full of GP’s and Specialists, access to MRI and X-ray, and laboratory, where your issue can be diagnosed fully and dealt with quickly. Surely this is better than going from pillar to post for days and weeks without resolution…
That’s how every other country does it…see one person, once, who fixes the problem. You don’t get the swarms of useless apparatchiks pushing paper and asking irrelevant questions, repeatedly, anywhere else but in the UK.
I understand where you are coming from, but it would be interesting to know the % of cases that get filtered out correctly by proper triage.
I suspect it is a high %.
I have quite severe Cellulitis in my lower legs, (result of shockingly poor treatment during lockdown, but I digress.) It has left me with very thin and easily damaged skin on my shins. A month ago, I got an infection above the ankle, and hot-footed it to Minor Injuries for some penicillin.
During the encounter, I had my blood pressure taken. It was high, as it always is. It seems like the natural thing for me. Anyway, a day passed, and then I got text after call after message for ten days to go and see my GP, (who I haven’t seen since 2015, despite all efforts). I have rejected them all. Why..? Because I know that the progress of my infected leg does not interest them one iota, but my blood pressure..? Hypertension is on their measureable outcomes, and so some beta blockers (no thanks…) and statins (err, no thanks.) are awaiting me, and they can breath a sigh of relief for getting me on a long term care pathway.
This explains many ‘diagnoses’ from ADHD to PTSD and a hundred more. They just want you on a nice simple ‘take two of these four times a day and come back for a blood test each month’. As the saying goes, pharma doesn’t want cures, it wants customers, and the NHS seems to have realigned itself with this completely.
I obviously also urgently needed a blood test done when the opportunity (see above) had arosen. The outcome was apparently that the blood in my veins is actually blood. I think that’s basically bloodletting in a modern guise.
I agree completely and of course healing human beings is an art that brings the limitations of this management system into stark relief for obvious reasons. You might get away with it in other areas but it can only lead to ever increasing failure in medicine. It does force questions – what would be sufficient to supplant this system and is it even possible at a societal level? After all such systems are sold as essentially systems of laziness and disengagement. These failures force us to look for real healing. And what would would a real healer need to know in a time like ours. Not just about their art but about the encroaching evil that has been supplanting that art for centuries. We shouldn’t be living in conditions where we have to ask ourselves, is it even worth it to visit our doctor? Might it not even be counterproductive on many levels? Perhaps the mRNA Mark of the Beast special was meant to make us ask this question.
No, this is the tale of a timewaster that believes he’s seriously ill and has to burn thru thousands of pounds of taxpayers cash to prove that he is.
A profoundly stupid comment. The guy isn’t a medical expert, just someone who’s in serious pain (If you don’t think muscle-related back pain is serious, wait until to you experience it for yourself for the first time. You’ll then be in for a rude awakening). Someone suggested a slipped disc — that’s not only painful but a possibly serious condition — and his GP said a MRI scan would be necessary to diagnose this. And then, he – still in serious pain – was first forced to go through a lengthy computerized questionnaire just to make sure the GP hadn’t misassessed the situation. And after having managed to clear this hurdle, was told that he needed to speak to a real physhiotherapist first, again to guard against the possibility that the GP had misassessed this. That’s the left hand of the NHS distrusting its right hand and forcing a guy who’s clueless about the situation (as he’s no medical expert) and blameless to jump through all kinds of hoops so that the left hand can hopefully prove that the distrust against the right hand was justified.
I have had serious back pain.
I simply waited and it got better.
I work in the Ambulance Service and people genuinely call 999 for back pain these days.
The Doctors will be happy to encourage his belief that he has a serious back problem, hopefully cut him open and put metal in his back to ‘cure’ him, their only reward being thousands of pounds of taxpayers money in their pocket for totally unnecessary treatment.
Always remember, ‘pain is just weakness leaving your body.’
I have had serious back pain.
I simply waited and it got better.
In other words, you didn’t. Take painkillers and wait (until it gets better or you’ll die, whichever happens first) is the universal ‘NHS practitioner’ diagnosis against anything. As so-called painkillers don’t work in these cases and ‘waiting’ doesn’t, either, one needs to do something against this which does work and – in countries with a working health system instead this giant antheap of useless parasites seeking to make a living be denying people necessary treatment whenever humanly possible – would even be available on prescription of a doctor after a proper diagnosis had been made. That’s usually some form of targetted movement in order to losen the cramped muscles.
You’re still commenting on something that’s certainly not the original article (that was about diagnosis and not treatment) and you’re still trying to hold people responsible for being clueless about medical conditions and thus, seeking professional help. As I already conjectured, you also habitually distrust GPs and want to hold people who aren’t responsible for that as well. Pain is a signal that something is out of order. It’s not a sign of ‘weakness’ and people with your attitude should works undertakers and certainly not suck on the NHS budget.
“Or you’ll die”
You don’t die of a bad back.
What you do die of is a cardiac arrest. It only happens once but if it does happen to you, I can assure you that you’ll almost certainly not get an Ambulance in time.
Why?
Because we’re all stuck in the carpark with patients on board who’ve called 999 for bad backs (or their equivalent).
A quality diagnosis…
Are you another one who thinks a bad back is potentially fatal?
What a cruel comment.
Yes, an easy one to diagnose: your doctor simply forgot for a moment that offering MRIs to suffering patients is a straightforward symptom of EOD (Early-Onset Dementia). He misspoke. It’s a common condition in the NHS. A GP or other ‘health professional’ makes an offer which will never be acted on. Nothing puzzling here. About eight years ago I did something to my back, and for two years following my GP’s assurances regarding MRIs I crept around the Kent countryside with, as I understood it at the time, two slipped discs – or one slipped plus a partial slipped or something (never explained) – my wife having repeatedly to come out in the car to pick me and the dog up after I’d finally surrendered to the pain of putting one foot in front of another. Life was awful at that time. Then I finally did get my MRI. A month later a keyhole op at King’s, Denmark Hill. The next day, complete freedom from pain.
So with my poor autistic son, who overdid it two years ago at the gym and who has been on stronger and stronger painkillers ever since, having been through I think three ‘meetings’, spread over many months, with ‘specialists’ who have contradicted each other and sent him to physios, clarifying nothing, leaving him with the view that no further help will be forthcoming. After a lifetime of battling the inflexibility of autism, trying to get a 28 year-old 6’2″ autistic man to change his mind is all too much. He has recently, finally, had an MRI, but the results once again were unclear and have led to further, seemingly infinite procrastination, tergiversation and equivocation on the part of those health professionals. About his constant pain They. Couldn’t. Give. A. Toss.
Compare with my sister: similar problems about 15 years ago; similar problem but the outcome was somewhat different. Diagnosed clearly and operated on within three months. But wait – she’s lived for the last 40 years in France. Same story from an old friend who lives in Australia. Are you starting to see the problem here?
British GPs are not meant simply to offer patients MRIs; they’re expensive! Never mind that the money wasted on Track & Trace (some 42 billions) would have paid for a new MRI scanner in every GPs’ surgery, every hospital and every corner shop throughout the land. Waiting lists my arse.
Anything musculoskeletal, go to a older type sports medicine / physio / acupunturist who knows all the old fashioned stuff like reflex pathways, they will be more likely to be able to diagnose even without the MRI. GPs and NHS useless for this type of thing, all they can do is offer painkillers that will do longer term harm. Even stuff like headaches can arise from postural issues, with muscle memory setting up stress pathways.
Yes, it will have to be a private, paid visit….
Seconded.
Sympathies with the author, hope he manages to stay sane through this labyrinthine sh*tfest and get the treatment he needs asap.
This may go against the grain on DS, I don’t know, but – what about paying for a private MRI? I had a bad wrist injury once which the NHS bone guy refused to scan or X ray (he ‘just knew’ what was wrong, obvs), wanted to treat completely inappropriately and shouted abuse at me when I refused. My chiropractor was able to refer for a private MRI which wasn’t as expensive as I thought, got the correct diagnosis and proved the bone guy (dangerously) wrong.
I know folks are going to say this shouldn’t be necessary/its what we pay our taxes for/etc etc but the NHS is broken and getting worse on a daily basis – it simply can’t be relied on any more. If its your health – and possibly even livelihood – that’s at stake, the investment might be worth it. And going in armed with your own MRI result might (should) speed up the process.
I fully agree.
I would absolutely go private if I felt I needed to, and I could afford it. A lot of people screaming about the horrors of privatising the NHS seem to miss the fact that essentially, we already have a two tier system. Sure, you don’t HAVE to pay, and emergency treatment (I mean for issues where you might die in the next few minutes or hours) on the NHS kind of works as long as they’re not having one of their regular seasonal crises – but if you want anything more “routine” (including severe and debilitating pain it seems) done in reasonable time, the NHS is unlikely to be able to help.
My NHS-loving MIL is horrified by this concept, I once told her that if my young daughter was going to die without private treatment, then of course I would “skip the queue” and go private. She wasn’t happy. I think she would genuinely watch someone she loved die from lack of treatment, or at least suffer hugely, rather than do something she perceives as unfair. She thinks the NHS is great anyway, and that any sort of attention they might give her is undeserved and taking away from other people who need it more.
Find a good chiropractor. In my experience, doctors are not very helpful when it comes to back (or neck) pain, assuming you can even get a useful appointment within several days. I regularly go to chiropractic to get myself (literally) straightened out.
And physiotherapy may solve everything. I had the exact same problem (severe pain in the neck and arm – caused by too much computer work) and after 3 unsuccessful weeks of treatment by an orthopaedic surgeon, a physiotherapist simply put me on my back and pulled my head back- and upwards (I simplify), thus increasing the space between the neck vertebrae and giving the slipped disc the opportunity to slip back into its proper position. After 10 minutes of this, the pain was gone. Of course, the pain slowly returned but repeat treatments solved the problem completely.
Sorry, I am aware this was not the real point of the article but the above did teach me there can be valuable alternatives to standard medical treatment.
It’s called ‘failure demand’ – the extra demand placed on an organisation or individual when systems are badly designed and do not handle the variety of demand being placed upon it. No doubt the system churns out masses of useless information that the health bureaucrats then spend hours reviewing.
That whole point of these over complicated, quasi technological processes is as described, to delay the treatment of patients by doctors.
Prime Directive of automisation/computerisation: The machine can only replicate a manual process – not invent one, to do it quicker and more efficiently. It cannot invent a process. If the manual process is flawed, so will the machine process be; if there is no manual process, there can be no machine process.
Translation: don’t blame the tech, blame the people running the show.
Why anyone would imagine that that lumbering State dinosaur can be improved with technology, is indeed unwell. Silk purse, sow’s ear…
With far less knowledge than many on here, and having to rely on old-fashioned common sense*, I can’t help but notice that pre-Covid I could ring my GP and get an appointment that day. Only once in the preceeding 16 years did I have to wait until the next day for one. Since Covid, you have to ring up, tell whoever answers (and who has no business knowing why you need the doctor) why you need the doctor, make yourself available for a phone call from the doctor or nurse only to be told during the phone call to come in and see the doctor. This I knew from the beginning, which is why I rang the doctor in the first place.
My girlfriend rang the doctor as she was genuinely ill. She was given an apppintment for two weeks later.
On another occasion she had a bad throat infection. The doctor video called her and asked her to point the camera into her mouth. This didn’t inspire her or me with confidence.
My commen sense is telling me that this system isn’t working and isn’t how it used to work. There are only around 4350 people in this small town. It genuinely perplexes me why they can’t do it the way they used to do it pre-Covid. It perplexes me how these GP surgeries can look us in the eye and tell us that they are doing their best to improve services, because it’s obvious that the opposite has happened.
*Common Sense – also the reason why I ignored every Lockdown rule and felt my BS detector buzzing loudly when the miraculous ‘vaccine’ was announced.
The resurgance of common sense is now the last best hope for humanity and western society.