Patients put off with ‘bumped’ appointments

Published: 25th March 2010

• ONE might expect that receiving an outpatient appointment would mean the end of the wait to be seen.
Alas not when, with sickening monotony, letters inevitably drop through the door from the Royal Free a month or two later, apologising for “having to change” one’s appointment. Over the last years I have amassed a pretty sizeable collection of these from two departments in particular and wonder whether it is common practice across other departments at the hospital too. 
No reason is ever given in any of the letters and there appears to be no limit to the number of times one can be sequentially “bumped” before finally being seen.
I have just been once again “repeat-bumped” to July from an April date I was originally “bumped” to from a mutually agreed January follow-up appointment, meaning that I will now be seen seven months later than the clinician originally requested (unless, of course, as I’m half-expecting, I get “bumped” from this latest one too!)
If you question the reasons for this by phone, you just get told that it “must be down to the way the department organises holiday leave”. 
The letters are all identical, except that the latest has arrived bearing a new hospital logo that proclaims “world class care”. They all arrive several weeks after their stated date.
To hospital trustee Jan Morgan, who thinks that the £70,000 diamond desks in the hospital entrance will “greatly facilitate and improve the patient experience” (Fit for Royal, March 11), I would like to say that these, like the swanky new logo on the latest “bumping” letters, are just meaningless management vanity projects.
The money would be better spent on organising holiday cover for staff, so that as in every other business, staff holidays do not mean the hospital simply ceases to provide a service that it has already offered and patients have already arranged (which in my case often means organising work cover of my own) to take up.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED, NW5