Not a private patient, so I didn’t get to see the doctor

Published: 24 February, 2011

• BECAUSE I was given an appointment for a pre-operative examination that post-dated the actual operation at the Royal Free Hospital, my GP alerted the vascular department and I was pleased to get a call on Friday from the hospital to report at 5pm the same day to be seen by a vascular specialist.

I arrived early for the appointment and was warmly greeted by staff in an unusually well-appointed department on the first floor. I had been warned that I might have to wait a little while as the specialist may still be in theatre, but when I arrived it was clear that my specialist was still at the hospital.

However as I answered questions from the staff the mood changed when it became clear that I was not a “fee-paying patient”. 

At one stage I was even asked how I had got into the “Lyndhurst rooms” as if I was some sort of interloper.

After more than an hour the reception staff, clearly embarrassed, said that the specialist had gone home and that I would have to come back on Monday – but to another part of the hospital, of course.

I am not a particularly sensitive soul, but I have to confess that in that waiting room I was upset and felt like a third-class citizen, whose condition was some way from being a priority to the hospital. 

I am in no doubt that a proffered credit card would have meant I would have seen that specialist that evening.

I am 79. I remember when the health service was founded – in part as recognition for the people of the country who had endured the poverty of the 1930s and then had gone on to make all sorts of sacrifices to bring about the defeat of Fascism and the safeguarding of our freedoms.

Like millions of other ordinary people I have, of course, paid my dues over a long working life. Hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax and National Insurance. 

Our money built hospitals like the Royal Free and equipped them. It’s quite likely that my money helped to train that specialist to who chose to go home, rather than see a non- “fee-payer”.

This experience has brought home sharply the nature of our two-tier health service which is an insult to those who have worked hard to create and develop it and to those it was set up to serve. 

I am sad and disappointed that my local hospital works in this way. 

It makes the term “free at the point of delivery” meaningless.

JEAN ANDERSON
East Heath Road, NW3