It's been a circular day, thankfully it's completed.

Went for a clinic appointment about matters neurological. The 'person' called my name nicely, took me into the consulting room, and began her questions. After she'd asked her first, I asked my first, which was, 'Please could you tell me who you are and what you are?'

Now you might think that's a daft question - referred by GP, clinic appt, consulting room BUT, said person is part of a multi-disciplinary team. Said person turned out to be neither a doctor nor a nurse but some other clinician whose title failed to register with me as it wasn't something I've heard of, and that takes some doing after many years of being employed by or a patient of the NHS. These little courteous acts don't take much effort but do help an awful lot.

After a con-flab with the doctor, the decision was that an urgent, within the week, MRI was needed. I arrived home to find that the secretary from the clinic has mistaken my number for the MRI suite secretary so had left a message saying, 'Hello B....... it's the clinic here. I'm just checking the fax arrived to enable you to organize this urgent MRI. Please could you let me know?' She then left a second for B...... saying she hadn't yet heard back from her.

But my answer phone message includes my name, the name of the patient she was telling B....... she'd sent a referral about!!!! She's kindly left her number for B...... so I rang her to let her know. She also has an answer phone so I reciprocated with a message and heard nothing more.

What if I had been keeping this medical appointment confidential? Anyone checking the answer phone messages would now know what was going on. When you want them to leave a message they say they can't due to confidentiality issues and when you don't, they do!!!

Enough already. Won't bore you with the rest of my day. Rant over.


But, the MRI suite didn't phone me with an appointment as promised, not on either phone to the best of my knowledge, not leaving a message if they did phone, even though I gave permission for them to do so...

Maybe they left one on the clinic secretary's answer phone instead.