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 Waiting Room
Medical mishaps reported each week by our covert correspondent, Jackie Marshall, who works at the coalface of modern medicine - the waiting room at a National Health Service (NHS) clinic. (Why not catch up on Jackie's most recent trials and tribulations.)
The Touchscreen Debacle
October 2, 2006
There's a lot of high-faluting politician-talk about the National Health Service, but from where I'm sitting - which, as it goes, is behind a computer screen with the earphones plugged in, on appointment duty - there are two basic problems with the NHS. One's the staff. And the other's the patients. The mathematical formula goes something like (s - e) + (p - b) = snafu; where s = staff, e = empathy, p = patient and b = the brains you were born with and snafu is a piece of army slang you can look up on Google.
Gloria, my colleague - fiftysomething, angry with the world - is illustrating this right now. She's been ignoring the man on the other side of the desk for a full thirty seconds. Eventually, she sighs and looks up.
"Yes?" she says.
The man shuffles a bit. "I've got an appointment at nine-fifteen," he says.
Gloria rolls her eyes. For the twelfth time today. "Check-in over there," she says.
"Oh, right," says the man. Wanders towards the other end of the reception desk. The queue shuffles forward. Gloria leafs ostentatiously through a pile of mail.
The queue is nine deep now. People keep casting me pleading looks, but the phone is burning up.
"I've got an appointment," says the next lady in line.
Gloria rolls her eyes again. "Check-in in over there."
"Oh," says the lady. "Okay." Turns and bumps into the man before her, who has come back.
"Sorry," he says. "But there's no-one there over there."
Gloria rolls her eyes for the fourteenth time. "On the screen," she says. "You check in on the screen."
"On the screen?" asks the man.
"Yes," she snaps.
"But I..." he says.
Gloria heaves a sigh. "Just touch the screen and enter your details," she says.
"Can't you just..."
"No," says Gloria, flatly. "Can't you see I'm busy?"
We introduced the new check-in system a month ago. It's a touch-screen. You touch it. It's not brain surgery. Then again, very few of our patients are brain surgeons. And given that use of health services tends to increase with age, many of our patients are as likely to cross themselves at the sight of a computer as embrace it as the wave of the future. Really, we should have someone supervising the thing for a few weeks, like they do at the airports, but of course we don't. Far too busy, on Gloria's part, playing Windows Solitaire.
The woman behind him touches his shoulder. "You just touch it," she says.
He looks with rheumy eyes. "Touch it?"
She reaches out, touches the empty screen. It springs to life. TOUCH TO CHECK IN, it says.
The man stares, blankly. His jaw works loose, disappears inside his collar. "Go on," she says.
"But you've touched it now," he says.
"That's okay."
"Yes, but, now you've got to go ahead of me."
"No, I... oh, never mind. I'll show you," she steps forward. Identifies herself as female, enters her date of birth.
YOU HAVE CHECKED IN FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT AT NINE-THIRTY, reads the screen.
"But I'm at quarter past," says the man.
"That's my appointment," she says. "You just do the same thing I did."
Gingerly, he dabs the screen. Presses Female. Enters the woman's date of birth.
YOU HAVE CHECKED IN FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT AT NINE-THIRTY.
He looks slightly tearful and returns to my colleague.
"Excuse me - "
"Yes?"
"I've got an appointment..."
"There's a queue," snaps Gloria.
"Oh, sorry," he mumbles. Obediently, he rejoins the back of the line.
Half past, he gets to the front again. "I've got an appointment at nine-fifteen."
Gloria sighs again. Puts down an advertising leaflet for anti-depressants. Glares at him over her half-moon specs. "You're late," she says.
"No, but..." he begins.
"You've missed your appointment now," she says.
"But..."
"Do you know," she says, "how much it costs the NHS every year, for missed appointments? Someone else could have had that appointment, you know."
"But..." he says.
"Well, it's too late now. You'll have to wait for an emergency appointment."
"Oh," he says. "How long's the wait?"
"You should have turned up early, if you wanted an emergency appointment. It's about two hours, now."
"Oh..."
Suddenly he looks very old, very tired.
"Well," says Gloria triumphantly, "you should have turned up on time. You can't expect the whole system to wait for you, you know."
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
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