Carrot Flower King
Janitor of Lunacy
Thing is it should be known to anyone who has to deal with the NHS. The letter sent out to tell you will get a call from the outpatients/clinic, call is 30 seconds, but that's the patient contacted within 2 weeks and "started" on the system! Next appointment might be in 6 weeks time to see someone or of course much longer.
Oh yeah: I'm well familiar with the "screening appointment" to get folks off the observable waiting list and on to that thing-which-doesn't-actually-exist-at-all, the internal waiting list.
When I worked on Teesside this was a source of considerable tension between 3 of the patch team leaders, who wouldn't run internal waiting lists, on the one hand and the other patch team leader, supported by the service manager, on the other, who did actively run screening and an internal waiting list and also happened to be the partner of the service manager...
When I jacked it in in 2013, we'd had a new "system" forced on us, which we were forced by management to misuse in order to get folk off the visible waiting list and on to the invisible internal list. This was about the third time up here we'd had managment enforced internal lists, which some of us had refused to go along with - I was threatened with disciplinary action and reporting to the NMC, but I called **** For Brains' bluff (why, yes, I actually DID have a manager called **** For Brains)...And had a hard time for several years as a result. I did out last **** For Brains who was made redundant, along with the next 2 up the line, during some Stalinist purge.