visit to the surgery

Since the cold and scratchy throat and the non-stop sniffles won't be ignored any longer, a visit to the GP was planned for this morning. Our appointment was for 9:40 am. We waited in the visitors' lounge to be called in, and then waited some more. A played with a fiesty baby who laughed everytime she looked at his face. A is walking around with a bit of a winner's smile which I am sure will get polished off in the evening when baby J cries after taking one look at him!

The wait continued up until 10:30 am by which time A's antics with the baby, A's complaining about the time and A's fussiness with the quality of magazines in the surgery were beginning to get to me in the extreme. Mercifully, Dr. W called us in and I was able to talk to someone about more pressing issues.

Or so I hoped. Apparently NHS has a policy that no patient will be attended to for more than 10 minutes. The time allocated to each patient is 10 minutes and you gotta get yourself sorted in those 600 seconds. So you can imagine my stupefied face when Dr. W said, 'Sorry we are running a little late today and so can you come back another time for your knee? I'm afraid I only have time to deal with your cold this morning.' :-O

No, I am really sorry but I am absolutely not looking forward to another session of everything that happened since morning. I appreciate the tremendous stress that the NHS is under. Does anyone appreciate what an individual has to go through to take a morning off work, wait for the mysterious NHS system to allow them to see a doc and then finally be told you can discuss the flu but not the knee pain? Is this system for real?

No wonder almost everyone I know who can afford to goes to India to get themselves medically sorted. There's something very wrong somewhere when you'd much rather spend thousands of pounds and go to India for medical attention instead of down the street to your local GP.