Medway Hospital again. Remember them?

Until yesterday, I thought that I had escaped the clutches of Medway Hospital. Then they came back to haunt me...............

In reading what comes next, please bear in mind that in the UK there is a statutory right to be given copies of your health records on demand, and that NHS bodies have the right to charge "up to and not exceeding £50". Just another NHS quirk; they do not seem to have got the hang of the fact that the records are yours................this is the compromise that did not upset doctors (in particular) too much and is deisgned to keep the workload of bureaucrats down whilst putting an additional bureacrative process in train.

You may recall that before Christmas I asked Medway Hospital to supply me with a copy of my medical records. I had been referred to UCH and had no faith that Medway would forward the scans etc so thought it safer to have something portable which did not rely on the NHS. (As it turned out, a wise move as they did not send anything, not even an electronic link, to UCH. They were not to know that the scans from Medway were far too primitive for a 21st century hospital to use, it was just the usual standard of "service").

The copies arrived promptly before Christmas. In January I reviewed the CD ROMS and spotted that something might be missing; a whole set of scans as it turned out. I naturally contacted Medway who were unaware that they had got it wrong. They sent the remaining part of my record.

So far, so Medway. I asked for something, they supplied part of it, I spotted their mistake and got them to correct it. This is about par for the course for this hospital!

When an invoice for the full £50 arrived in January, I assumed it was a mistake. They might have supplied the records, but not without me having to put some of the work in. I did what any right minded person would do and placed it in the tertiary filing system (the bin).

Lo and behold! Yesterday a copy invoice arrived with a threatening note demanding that I pay up or else...............

A short exchange with the finance clerk whose name appeared on the letter ("nothing I can do about it, you will have to talk to the secretary"), the secretary (you owe us the money because we gave you your records) led me to the Medway Hospital head of legal services......the ultimate bureaucrat in the department.

His contention can be simply summed up as: you ask us for something, we f**k it up, you spot our error, we rectify our error and charge you whilst claiming that we did our job.

It is no wonder that Medway Hospital is in "special measures" if this is their attitude. I wonder if it stretches to surgery........you can imagine the conversation:

"You took off the wrong leg"

     "Thank you for pointing that out; which leg was it exactly?"
     -
     -
     "We have now removed the other leg and have discharged our responsibility so please do not make any more fuss" 

"You have not done your job properly"

    "Oh yes we have, we took off the correct leg in the end"

I would not be at all surprised if a version of the above conversation took place on a virtually weekly basis in Medway Hospital!

I did offer to pay part of their invoice, but they are still insisting that they did their job well. This leaves me with a dilemma: do I waste time and effort making a point, or do I just pay up like a good little patient?

If you have any views, please feel free to send them; I have genuinely not made up my mind yet. Better still, if you are a lawyer, perhaps you would like to donate an opinion?

For any aspiring composers out there, perhaps you would like to make a few small alterations to this one in order to make it even more relevant to Medway Hospital................??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU