maniacmartin

For all you foreigners, the NHS is Britain’s free state-funded health system.

A lot of people are opposed to the NHS’s ongoing computerization of patients’ records, because it is seen as a waste of taxpayer’s money. Whilst I agree that our government has a history of badly-implemented IT projects that have gone vastly overbudget, the NHS should have been centralized years ago. Surgeries all have their own systems, and most parts of the NHS rely at least partly on paper records. When you move house, you change your registered doctor, and your old surgery sends your records in a bundle to your new surgery.

At St. John’s College and, presumably, many other Oxford colleges, there is a policy whereby you must be registered with an Oxford doctor. This means you cannot be registered with a doctor in your home town. Last summer, when I wanted something as routine as a repeat prescription, my home surgery initially refused because I wasn’t “on their books”. After persevering, I had to fill a temporary resident form (or something to that effect.), which needed my NHS number, something I don’t carry around on me.

Of course now I’m old enough to have to pay for my prescriptions, the amount dispensed seems to have reduced. (You pay pertype of medication, no matter how much of that particular drug you are dispensed). Now I’m back in Oxford, I’ll have to make sure I top up my supplies before going home. But the doctors here have never prescribed me that medicine. Will they issue a repeat prescription when given an old repeat prescription from another surgery? I’ll probably have to book an appointment with one of the doctors, wasting a slot, just to get them to do some paperwork.

This is 2007. Virtually every other sizable organisation has integrated computer systems. Why should the NHS be any different? And why do I need to get a new repeat prescription printed for every instance of the repeat prescription. Surely that can make a form that says “Repeat prescriptions every 60 days until 01/01/2008″ that is stamped every time you make a claim off it, or something similar? The current system wastes everybody’s time and causes unnecessary inconvenience.