Has anyone else had this experience with the NHS?

[Orpheline]

On the 27th of April, my GP fast-tracked me for an appointment at the hospital, which I should have had a year ago.
This was an emergency consultation, to be within 2 weeks. So a window up until 10th May. I was given the date May17th.
I've just received a letter, intended for my GP, by mistake. It states that I didn't attend my 10th of May appointment??!!
This implies that the hospital were working within the specified time-frame, and that I am a time-waster.
If the NHS are routinely behaving like this, it's going to skew the statistics for a) no-shows, and b) their performance.
I also resent the fact that they've used my name in their skewing of the facts. AIBU?

Ds needed monthly appointments when he was under 5, 1/2 jobs, stressful and worrying. After the 1st the appointment letters came the day of the appointment (too late to attend) so I’d call, get a sympathetic voice telling me how hard it must be to make appointments and they’ll rearrange to save me worry. Meant they ended up being a 6 weeks apart and pushed the whole tomescale back. Finally worked out to call a week after an appointment to ask when the next one was. No letter had arrived but we were there! To a clinic for the elderly, literally me abs ds in a buggy and everyone else 80+. No one seemed pleased to see us but after that the appointments for the right clinic came through.

These make my gripe look pale.
When you're at your lowest ebb, the last thing you need is a shaking of your confidence in the medical profession.
One light moment was when I received a letter from a professor, slating the consultant that it was intended for . At least his secretary was suitably apologetic.

It's just an error. These things happen. It's not deliberate!

On the other side I'm the clincan who k kws the letters have been sent sat waiting for no one to come so frustrating. When it's whole clinics or patients I know well I do often wonder what the hell is happening in the post room. It is 100% not deliberate on our point as our waits are not a target

Got referred before Christmas and received a letter stating ‘not making appointments covid etc blah, blah, blah; will put your name on a list to go on a waiting list for an appointment. Don’t ring us as we won’t bring your appointment forward, if you have problems, see the dentist who referred you’ (oral surgery dept - was referred by GP)

Late April got a letter stating ‘as you’ve not responded to our letters we’ve discharged you from the waiting list and informed your referring clinician’. Called them up as I’d received nothing and left message stating such on answerphone for department secretary. She rang me later that day quite sheepish that “a colleague” had randomly sent the same letter to a large number of people on the ‘waiting to go on the waiting list’ list instead of sending out a letter informing them they’d been moved to the waiting list or had been allocated an appointment. She then gave me an appointment for 2 weeks later (which got cancelled to another day the following week).

The week after the rescheduled appointment I had a letter from my GP’s explaining they had been informed of my lack of response to them and subsequent discharge from the department - they were quite surprised when I let them know of the hospital’s cock up!!

Thanks I am going to complain to pals. Same thing happened here.

PALS every time. Thank you

It's just an error. These things happen. It's not deliberate!

It's a complete lack of care.

@baldafrique

It's just an error. These things happen. It's not deliberate!

These things haven't happened to us since we left the UK 15 years ago.

I think it's the same in all public sector organisations. DD1 is under CAMHS. The first appointment was cancelled just minutes before it was due, but they were emailing the wrong email address (the nurse in hospital had written it down wrongly). After that, it's just become silly. Rarely get appointment letters. If I phone up to confirm an appointment it takes them about 20 minutes to work out who she's seeing and at which location.

I applied for lasting power of attorney for my mother and included evidence of income for fee exemption. It was rejected because the evidence didn't name my mother, and returned to me. I emailed them with a scan of the evidence and pointed out where it named my mother, asking why it had been rejected. They responded that it was acceptable evidence, but it hadn't been sent to them, so I could send it to them and they would accept it. So I posted it back to them with a covering letter and my mother's name highlighted - they accepted it

Administration is a skilled job attracting a low wage.

My brother had a letter with a hospital appointment with a date and time and area zone. Went. Registered with the receptionist. People kept going in in front of him so he reminded the receptionists he was there and they said it's OK, you're ticked off on our list. Eventually after waiting 2 hours he complained again. They got him into to see the consultant and it turns out it should have been a telephone appointment and they had been ringing his phone which he'd left In his car because he couldn't use it in the hospital. He showed the consultant his letter who accepted the hospital had made a mistake. He was examined and left.

He accidentally discovered a few weeks later that the consultant had sent a letter to his GPS complaining that he hadn't answered the phone when they rang and put him down as a no-show. He was livid. He didn't even know that was on his record. And he'd had scans the consultant had sent him on.

Lo and behold, he gets another appointment with consultant and given date, time and zone to attend. He rang the consultants secretary and it was another mistake. It should have been a telephone appointment. She told him it happened all the time.

I don't think its a conspiracy, it's just inefficiency. I think you have to have joined up thinking for it to be a conspiracy and I don't see any evidence of that at our local trust.

They should be routinely copying you in to any correspondence to your gp unless a good reason not to, so you probably didn't receive the letter by mistake. Quite why every appointment still needs posting out is another matter. It could be a scam to meet the KPI.

Booked in for a consultation about a knee operation. Was walking with a stick. Woke up with a vomiting migraine, which I get from time to time and is on my records, have been hospitalised twice because of them. Rang the number to notify if unable to attend - several times because it was a long wait and then an answerphone. Finally left a message. Got a letter saying I'd been removed from the consultant's list for non attendance and when I got on to them he refused point blank to put me back on. He would have left me with no route to getting the knee op without a moment's thought. Luckily, through a friend, I got an appointment to see a private consultant. He put me straight on his NHS list and was so frustrated by what happened he waived his private fee.

So I found out today that it’s a four month waiting list to get an appointment (and presumably I will still have to wait after I get the appointment) but my referrals been accepted.

I hope they send the letter!

I know it's different but nhs dentist is lovely but I've noticed a handful of times she will write on the form that I sign (yes I know I shouldn't sign it) that she has done more work then she has. She adds on xrays or a scale and polish. I questioned it once and she said she had planned to do that next time. But next time she never does.

My NHS**

The tel app thing happened to me though they always mess up. Took my son in to hospital a week after he was discharged following an operation to be told it was a telephone app but my letter didn't say that.

I had that recently! I explained that I hadn't missed a previous appointment and it was their error

I recently got an a repeat appointment for one that I had allegedly missed. I'd never had the original appointment and wasn't even expecting one as I'd been discharged at my last clinic appointment anyway. And the appointment was for someone I'd never seen anyway. All very odd. When I rang the appointments department they tried quite hard to persuade me to go, telling me that it would be recorded as me refusing treatment, was I sure I understood the risks etc. Not that I cared - I don't think that declining an appointment with a shoulder surgeon is likely to be too dangerous for my foot problem - but the lack of concern as to how I'd got the wrong appointment bothered me. I'd been imagining that I'd been given someone else's appointment and hence there was another patient somewhere who hadn't received one, maybe someone with the same name or something? But they didn't seem to consider that the mistake was possibly there's- it had to be me who'd misunderstood.
I had a phone appointment for something else today actually. Over 2.5 hours late and not so much as a "sorry". As it happens, I wasn't going anywhere but I might have been. I appreciate all services are stretched these days but it costs nothing to be polite.

Oh, and somewhat bizarrely, my latest hospital correspondence lists my GP as someone that not only did I never see (as she's a personal friend so it would be unethical) but who retired over 5 years ago!

A few years ago I was trying to get transferred to a new recurrent miscarriage clinic and the one I was coming from needed to fax over my notes. Long story short, after a lot of chasing up I ended up one afternoon on 2 phones talking to the admins from both clinics, as one put the sheets in the fax machine at one end, and the other one... got nothing. "Oh, it must be broken then. But it's given me the paper copy so I thought that meant it must have gone?" It turned out that no, their fax machine was not sending anything anywhere and she had no idea how long it had been like that but it was definitely at least 3 weeks as that was when she first faxed my notes to the new clinic. Can you imagine that? Every fax for 3 weeks? Just... didn't go. And they hadn't noticed. So I can very easily believe that someone somewhere ticked a box to say you'd been written to, OP, when no such thing had happened.

I had similar issues.

First appointment. Letter said in bold print it was a telephone consultation and not to attend hospital. I booked annual leave to be free for the call. Waited all day but no call.

Then got a letter threatening to remove me from their list because I had not attended my appointment. I called and explained. It was bluffed over and a second appointment given.

Second appointment for telephone consultation. Again booked annual leave and again no call.

The day after I should have had the second appointment the consultant called me while I was working from home. Luckily I was able to take the call but they were shirty when I mentioned my appointment had been for the previous day.

The following week I got two letters, one cancelling my second appointment and once scheduling the appointment for the day I got the call from the previous week.

I am attending for test soon which I hope will go without problems but so far they seem to be a bunch of clowns. There must be a shocking amount of money wasted on these errors.

I think it's all got a lot worse since services were centralised on the grounds of "efficiency". Certainly in our area it used to be that every Consultant had a secretary and they dealt with all the appointments etc. If you phoned, you got that same person to talk to and, in my experience at least, they generally seemed to care and have a pride in their work. They also knew enough about their Consultant's work to have a pretty good idea what normally happened to patients so could tell if something was off kilter. Not saying that mistakes never got made, but they were fairly easy to sort out on the whole and you didn't seem to get fobbed off and passed from person to person like nowadays. These days all appointments here are dealt with in a central call centre that isn't even in the same town, and nobody seems to have any real understanding or care about the impact on patients. In the "bad old days" I did always at least feel like a person, whereas now you're just a number to be sorted into a box.

I drove an hour through rush hour traffic with a baby to have her hips checked. Arrived to be told the doctor was on holiday but they'd been too busy to cancel all his appointments.

This was nearly 2 decades ago - doesn't look like anything has improved...

When my son was young and having long running treatment he used to regularly get removed from the list because we didn't show up for appointments. Except every time it was because we had a letter from the hospital changing the appointment. Every time the GP had to write and explain to get him put back on, which meant the next treatment was delayed a couple of months.