An apple a day........

Margret always shares the produce of her garden with us. She brought three different varieties of apple today. This is a Cox's Orange Pippin. It provided my blip on a grey, wet day when I had no desire to go out.

What follows is a bit of a rant about the NHS, so don't read unless you really want to.

My GP referred me for an urgent appointment on October 11th. That means I should have been offered an appointment within 2 weeks. Foolishly, I gave her my holiday dates and assumed my appointment would be on my return.

Instead, the Contact Centre - when did consultants stop reading referral letters I wonder? - rejected the referral and said it should be made again when I returned. I did not know this, although the practice knew on 12th.

Every day I was waiting for the appointment to arrive.  I phoned the surgery on Friday (23rd) to see what was happening. No reply to that. Yesterday, I started to do a detective job and find out which hospital I'd been referred to, but, of course, I had not been referred anywhere!

Those of you who know about the NHS will realise that the cancellation was so they did not offer an appointment more than 2 weeks after referral. It makes the stats look better. Grrr!

Now I'm waiting again. I wanted to discuss the blood results with a GP and the first phone appointment was November 11th. I'm afraid I had to say it was urgent and I could not wait that long.

The new phone system is frustrating beyond measure, although I do hear that some other practices are doing better than ours. We have excellent GPs, but the feeling that you cannot contact them is quite frightening.

Rant over. Watch this space for an appointment to appear. Perhaps that will be a phone one too..........