nhs choose and book system

[southeastastra]

is rubbish. spent ages selecting hospitals etc then told: there are no appointments.

so ring the number, where they have no appointments either. they will get hospital to call me within 2 weeks!

this is taking so long to sort out. i want to cry.

You could ring the consultant's secretary to check that it has definitely been received. I have known referrals go mysteriously missing in the computer system.

Or you can ask your GP's secretary to check on the system for you. That is pretty straightforward to do.

I wasn't particularly satisfied with C&B either in my experiences as a patient. Wrong clinic, cancelled appointments, no referral letter received. It really is useless.

thanks emma i will. hate this system!

I am at the Hospital end of CAB and it is unutterably shite.

Frustrated patients
Frustated GP's
Fristrated hospital admin staff
Frustrated Consultants

I was just about to start a rant about this!!!!!

gp is referring me to ortho hand surgeon. Saw her last monday when she tried to put it into system. System wasn't playing with her. So she said she would send paperwork by post. Didn't arrive friday so I had to phone and chase as she asked me to.

Paperwork arrived today. Went on to website. GP had given me a choice of two clinics. Both came up with 'There are no available appointments at this time. Please ring xxxxx ' So I phoned up the number to be told 'we only have the same information as is on the internet.' Then she said that she could pass on my details to the hospital. That would take up to two weeks. If I don't hear in two weeks contact gp.

Anyway I've left a message for my gp who is in tomorrow because frankly I don't trust the system to work.

darrellrivers - I expect you are right about it partly being a way to fiddle waiting lists. Hosp waiting list average for ortho is 17 days according website. Bloody joke!

I am just going through the very same thing with the choose & book system for my dd.

She's now been waiting several months for an "urgent" appointment. They are now denying that they ever had the referral. I know they had it, but it seems that dd isn't on the waiting list now. How convenient for them... she vanishes off the list as they have breached national waiting time guidelines

Can I just say from the perspective of an admin person who books waiting lists for the NHS, it is really crap on this side of it too. We are constantly being harassed by management for failing to meet their breach targets, when the theatre list are cancelled at short notice for all sorts of reasons, lack of staff, lack of surgeon, lack of equipment, infection, etc etc. Where I work we have closed a local hospital which had a complete Day Theatre unit which had 4 theatres and could accomodate overnight stays. We still have to be able to date the increasing number of patients into smaller amounts of perating time and beds. Anyway, my dd is an orthopaedic patient too, and I completely understand your frustrations, as we are going through it too. Just don't give up, keep nagging and eventually you will get through to someone who can hopefully sort things out.

I'm a medical secretary and I'm expected, by management to comply with C&B when booking clinics.

However, I do my own thing because C&B is a pile of crap. My computer is too old and slow to cope with it.

I find I only have a waiting list for new patients of 2 to 3 weeks because all the local GPs know me and my consultant boss will take proper, old fashion letters or faxes as referral. I book them in gaps in a proper, old fashioned paper diary.

I then put them on the computer AFTER I've spoken to the patient and agreed an appointment date.

God that sounds more complicated than it is. But.. result... easy to manage for me and my consultant boss and happy patients.

Moon - I'm a med sec and agree C&B a lot of codswallop! Is your hospital doing the medical secretary review at the moment? (Getting rid of med secs and rebanding).

It is a crap system - I am trying to locate an othopaedic surgeon in my area. The website does not give the name of the consultant or which procedures they tend ot favour /how much experience they have in this particular surgery. Although I could gauge some basic info on a consultant if I found out the name and they also had a private clinic. The procedure is key for bunion surgery where there are over 100 different procedures but ortho surgeons tend favour a smaller ranger within that. Have spend two weeks compiling ortho surgeon names by ringing hospitals not all of whom were keen on giving out the names. Why? barely any had details on the the internet on the hospital site. I ended up paying £2 for two hours on a specialist medical database - i presume used by sales people to identify the majority of the names of the ortho consultants across this area. There are at least 6 hospitals within 30 mins of me. I am now about to email all of them. I emailed one two weeks ago and got no response so not overly confident.

Vev... They did a study into whether it would be cost effective to outsource med secs. It would be in the short term, when the outsourcing companies are quoting 2p a line for typing. But once med secs are all sacked and the hospital's contract with the outsourcing company comes up for renewal, the price goes up to around £1 a line. The hospital is then forced to pay as all their ex-med secs have found other employment.

I believe that Choose and Book is part of bigger plot to get rid of med secs, outpatient clerks etc. I think we will see patients having no contact at all with a consultant via a secretary and all calls will be handled by foreign call centres. This is a worry for our psychiatric patients, who often ring me expressing suicidal ideas, having panic attacks, needing urgent advice about medication etc. I can spend hours on the phone calming distressed patients, many of whom I have known years. A call centre would only be interested in getting them off the line. I can see deaths occurring.

There are also issues with confidentiality since a typist in India threatened to post patients' details on the internet unless the hospital paid her a couple of million dollars. The outsourcing staff are very badly paid and are often qualified nurses and doctors in their own countries. So, using them as typists is taking skilled people out of their own hospitals, meaning patients in India are getting a worse service.

Its a huge area for debate. I went to medical secretaries' conference at Unison headquarters in London last year to discuss this with med secs from all over the country. Unison have produced a pack they can let you have if you feel your job is under threat in your hospital.

Gosh.. that was long... didn't really mean to go off on such a rant.

Moon - thanks for your reply. The med sec review is going on at present in our Trust and no-one seems to no anything or be able to tell us anything and we have been told by our managers there'll be a roadshow at the end of the month making things clearer. Do you know of any trust's where they've actually outsourced med secs?

Think we'll have to get on to Unison for a copy of their pack.

I'm a med sec too, but currently working on an inpatient unit as a bed manager (and I mean manager literally - I manage the waiting list and admissions).

Have you heard of The British Society of Medical Secretaries?. I used to belong but couldn't afford the subs anymore when I went on maternity leave and it lapsed.

My sister is also a med sec and all their typing is outsourced to India. She says when it comes back they have to add punctuation, make the layout readable as it comes back as one paragraph (and if your new patient letters are anything like the ones I used to type when I worked for a Trick Cyclist Moon, they're 5-6 pages long!), and make corrections. She says it would be easier to do it themselves.

Surfermum - thanks for that - we'll have to look into the BMS. Has your sister been rebanded or is she still on a band 4? We didn't know that some trust's had outsourced their typing. Don't know how it can work efficiently.

They were given band 3 under AFC - but appealed and are now band 4's. Outrageous that they were considered only to be band 3. I've worked as a med sec and I've worked for a manger (hated it) and there was just no comparison between the levels of responsibility.

I just don't get why the role of medical secretaries is so misunderstood.

Just want to add a huge hooray for medical secretaries. I'm a consultant physician. Our secs all went through the review last year with much opposition from consultants. There were a few vol redundancies and lots of reorganising of work. Sadly has left admin staff v demoralised. Management have no idea how vital med secs are and how holistic your role is. Now they're changing our printers so we all have to waddle off to some central printer to collect anything we've printed. Will lead to more gaps & mishaps. Bloody madness

To all of you who are trying to use the NHS rather than working in it - believe me, we're doing the best we can but in the face of loads of nonsense, very little common sense.

And don't even get me started on C&B..

I purposely put myself forward to sit on the matching panels for A4C as I was worried the med secs would get shafted. Luckily I got us all a Band 4 but it was hard graft trying to describe what a med sec did to HR people and managers who think we are just a fecking typing pool

I think Addenbrooks outsourced about 2 years ago and now trying to re-recruit med secs and get out of their contract with the outsourcing company.

What I heard from the Unison med sec meeting was that a lot of places are sacking 70% of med secs, making the rest Band 2 clerk typists who sit all day correcting outsourced letters, adding the patient details, GP address and signature block.

If you are Unison members, contact your local rep or regional centre and ask them for advice, posters, info packs etc. I know the name of the main man at central office, but I don't want to post his name on here really.

This might be of interest to the med secs on this thread.

www.unison.org.uk/asppresspack/pressrelease_view.asp?id=837

Thanks for your support Nappies. Our consultants have been told to keep out of it and they won't be listened to anyway 'cos what's happenings happening!

It is hard to understand why the role of med secs is so misunderstood - the way I see it'll all implode on itself. I think it's a start to get rid of the NHS altogether!

don't mind the hi-jack at all, it's been really informative, now understand how frustrating it is to all involved.

Thanks nappybaglady for the vote of confidence.

have appointment tomorrow, though nothing was sent in the post to confirm it, just hope they have me 'on the list'.

spoke to some nice people in the appointment line, they didn't seem to impressed with the system or why i didn't get a letter.

well done - I've still not heard a month later. am going to chase with gp tomorrow.
Hope your appt goes well.