By Royal Appointment III

I have gone off the Royal Free. I take back every word of praise I lavished in its general direction a few months ago. Today I had yet another appointment with the thyroid consultant. This time, the clinic was running an hour late. When I did finally see a doctor, he clearly hadn’t looked up a single thing about my case and just sat there leafing through past letters in my folder of notes before deciding to send me for another ultrasound scan and more blood tests and to see me in three months’ time. He asked me practically nothing about my symptoms and the only blood results he had to give me were three months out of date.
So I made a follow-up appointment in the clinic for the end of January and then walked downstairs to the ultrasound department to make an appointment for a scan of my neck. Previously, I have gone straight to the reception desk and they have given me the first available appointment – usually in a few weeks’ time, but nonetheless a fixed a date in the diary that I knew that I would be able to make. Today, however, I had to take a numbered ticket in reception and then sit and wait my turn for 20 minutes in order to book my appointment. When I did get to see a receptionist, I was then told that they couldn’t allocate me an appointment as each case now had to be looked over and judged on its urgency by a senior radiographer. Once it had been assessed, I would be sent an appointment by post. The receptionist said that it was likely to be March 2006 before I would get an appointment – not much use for my follow-up thyroid appointment at the end of January. I told the receptionist this and he said that there was nothing he could do other than make a note of this date. And that if the scan appointment, when it came through, was after the end of January, I would have to get my GP to write to the thyroid consultant to try and get the ultrasound department to bring the date forward. What a fucking farce. So instead of employing one person to allocate ultrasound appointments, they now have to use two, and I now have to waste not only my GP’s but also the consultant’s time in order to get the ultrasound department to carry out an instruction that the consultant has already given. I will also have to spend hours in a phone queue to the appointments department at the Royal Free to get them to move the follow-up thyroid appointment if the scan cannot be done beforehand. This kind of thing leaves me speechless. I don’t know who has taken over the management at the Royal Free and introduced all these new time-wasting bureaucratic policies, but they clearly have no appreciation of medical priorities and don’t have a fucking clue.