Choose and Book is rubbish

A week or so ago a young woman came in to hospital with cholecystitis. It isn't serious, but for most people you wind up removing the gall bladder to stop it happening again. However, you don't do this acutely unless you have to because the complication rates increase by a third (as the gall bladder tends to be harder to separate from the liver when inflamed) - so you let it settle down and bring them back to have it done.

This particular young woman was one of the unfortunate people who, while waiting for her operation, had had another attack and so had come in to see us. From talking to her it sounded like the first one had been diagnosed and treated by her GP, so well done him or her, and she'd been booked to have the gall bladder taken out.

She was obviously keen to have it done sooner given that she'd had the repeat episode, but was happy once we explained the reasons we tried not to do that. I did say I'd try to bring her date forward if possible, but ran into problems - I couldn't find any record of the operation with the secretaries. I went back to ask her about this, and it turned out this was because she wasn't booked with us, but at Other Hospital half an hour down the road. I asked if she'd rather have the op done there, and she said no, we were more convenient.

This begged the question - why had she been booked there to start with? The answer, inevitably, was Department of Health stupidity, specifically the diabolical Choose and Book. She'd been booked through that because the government now makes GPs use it if they want to hit their targets and get paid, and the quickest appointment had been at Other Hospital. So even though that meant her travelling three times as long to get to hospital, and being operated on somewhere they didn't know her (because acutely she comes in to her local hospital, us, when she's sick), it lets the government say people are treated faster!

I booked her with us and cancelled the Other Hospital appointment.