The NHS’s bureaucracy is torturing patients like me

Keir Starmer says ‘transformative tech’ wizardry will slash hospital and surgery waiting lists. How much more of this mystical mumbo jumbo do we have to suffer, writes James Moore

Keir Starmer has made fixing the NHS a big part of his offer (Getty)

White coat syndrome? I’ve got a chronic case.

Let me explain this for those of you scratching your heads and wondering what I’m talking about.

White coat syndrome is what happens when you have your blood pressure taken at the local hospital or GP’s surgery. Hypertension can look a lot more hyper when the patient is feeling tense, which is quite common in these settings.

Somewhat concerned at the numbers on my last hospital visit, I decided to get another blood pressure reading at Tesco.

While a supermarket pharmacy isn’t exactly my idea of a new age yoga parlour, it is a much more relaxed setting than anywhere you’ll find people wearing white coats or scrubs.

Needless to say, the readings I got at Tesco were much lower. Every little helps.

But I wonder what they’d have looked like if I had another test after I attempted to communicate them to my GP.

Trying to talk with one’s GP can these days resemble an assault course set to canned music even if you’re lucky enough to have a good doctor (and I wouldn’t surrender mine for a lottery win).

Long telephone waits, disembodied voices telling you you’re twelfth in the queue for two hours straight, getting hung up on when you finally do get through and then starting back at twelfth. I’m not exaggerating – not much, anyway.

There are eConsult services these days. Which ought to improve things. But they’re very clunky. They demand that you click through a limited menu of conditions and symptoms before you get to the bit where you have a limited number of characters to express your problem. It’s doctoring with the help of a couple of tweets.

Wait… I know! I’ll click on anxiety! Because even if you don’t suffer from that condition (and I do, does that surprise you?) you may find yourself joining the club if you try to take control of your healthcare as I’ve lately been trying to do.

I’ve also been told by more than one clinic that “you can contact us at any time” only to find that too is much easier said than done. Emails? They aren’t responded to unless you send them two, or three or 36. Using the telephone involves waiting… and waiting… and waiting. And then getting hung up on. And then getting told to call another number.

The stress caused when you really need to speak to someone is quite brutal.

Here’s the (slightly) reassuring part. If you make a fuss, you will eventually get through. Write enough letters and/or emails to a sufficient number of people, jump up and down, politely because otherwise you’ll get booted, and it is possible to get results. The squeaky wheel gets oiled. Even in today’s creaky NHS.

But the constant need to don half a ton of plate mail armour before going into genteel battle like a Dungeons & Dragons paladin with a +2 magic sword, it eats at you. It wears you down, especially if you have medical conditions to deal with.

Labour’s Keir Starmer has also been doing the paladin thing. He says he’s got a +2 sword of his own and he can use it to make the NHS work with the help of his adventuring pal Wes Streeting, who’ll wield the elder wand (or something) when he gets into the Department of Health and Social Care.

Fixing the NHS is one of Starmer’s five mystical missions.

In his latest newspaper missive, he said a Labour government would take hold of the NHS app we all employed during the pandemic and use it to “drive forward a more patient-focused, responsive service”.

Sounds just dandy, doesn’t it? A single door to all NHS services. A place to go to book, get reminders, guidance, and even take part in clinical trials.

Wait a moment, haven’t we heard this before? Haven’t we all heard talk about “transformative tech” and the wonderful things it will do? Repeatedly? From repeated administrations?

Call me a cynic, but I fear the Labour leader is in danger of over-promising. Tech is a wonderful thing. It could be wonderful for the NHS were it done properly. But there’s that little word “properly”…

There will also always be the human element too, the stressed out, fed up, run-off-their-feet human element, which doesn’t respond well to being hectored by politicians, which is what the Conservative government that Starmer is hoping to replace is very fond of.

Let’s face it, Starmer couldn’t do much worse. Some of his ideas sound okay. In principle.

But it’s the human element I’ve had to rely on to get my emails and calls answered. Layers of bureaucracy add mental agony to the physical. All that hectoring gets taken out on patients.

I’m writing this having just been told I’ve been kicked out of Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore pain clinic just as my own pain is starting to get extreme, having previously been told not to worry. Just call us when you need us (which means send us those emails, get hung up on, get redirected, find out you’re off the list). I wasn’t told call us within a year (and wade through a swamp) or we’ll kick you out. Call us when you need us.

So now to get seen for a chronic and incurable condition that is nonetheless treatable, it may be two hours on the phone and two weeks’ wait to get a GP to fill in a pointless stack of paperwork and start all over again.

You want to know why the NHS doesn’t work? There it is. Anyone got +2 sword handy?

All that said, this does rather serve to explain why white coat syndrome is a thing. National blood pressure is shooting for the moon.