OPINION – ROBERT FISK: I wager you’d view this as a waste of treasured time, however there’s methodology in my insanity.
Robert Fisk has a shocking approach of spending his time (Picture: Day by day Categorical)
Do you ever get the sensation {that a} customer support individual is hoping you may die so they do not must reply your enquiry? That, because the recorded message says “your name is vital to us” and the maintain music performs a model of Greensleeves, there’s somebody in a name centre who needs on your demise so they do not must fake to care about you wanting to finish your broadband contract? I get that feeling about one e mail I despatched to complain about points with a service I obtain. That service is the Nationwide Well being Service, and I despatched the e-mail to the complaints workforce on the hospital the place I’m going for remedy for my incurable bowel most cancers.
And day by day that goes by with no reply makes me suppose that they are surely ready for me to die to allow them to announce “case closed”. You would possibly suppose that I am being overly dramatic, however incurable most cancers is not referred to as that for enjoyable. Statistics counsel that solely 11% of individuals with my most cancers stay longer than 5 years after prognosis.
I used to be identified in June 2023, so I am previous the midway mark and will anticipate to be useless by June 2028. However once I despatched my e mail to my most cancers hospital’s complaints workforce, aka the Affected person Recommendation and Liaison Service, aka PALS, I had solely been combating the illness for 18 months.
I despatched my e mail to them on December 11, 2024, and obtained nothing again, not even an acknowledgement that my e mail had been obtained and that they’d look into it.
Again in Might final yr, I emailed to chase up my complaints and stated I wished to submit two extra, however was questioning if it might be higher to go straight to the ombudsman. I heard nothing again.
This yr, following one other incident I wished to report, I attempted once more to get a response and copied within the hospital belief’s chief government and one of many medical administrators. This time, I received a response from the chief government’s government assistant saying that the complaints workforce has been requested to comply with up with me.
That was greater than a month in the past, and I’ve heard nothing additional. You would possibly marvel why I trouble to complain once I ought to simply be having fun with the final two years of my life.
My aim earlier than I die is to enhance the lives of as many individuals as potential. It is successfully my one-sentence bucket listing earlier than I kick the bucket.
And so by elevating points with remedy at my so-called “world-leading most cancers hospital”, I am hopefully giving the workers an opportunity to repair them so individuals who get handled now and years into the long run have a greater expertise than I’ve.
However this can’t occur if the complaints workforce does nothing. They should examine points so modifications might be made and issues might be rectified. May you think about if a response did not come by means of till the day I die?
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I apologise now, however everybody who goes to my funeral must take heed to the response as a result of I am going to guarantee somebody reads it out as a substitute of a passage from the Bible or a eulogy.
Hopefully, by then, the hospital will realise that as a substitute of being conscious of the significance of doing one thing like I have been informed previously, they really must do one thing.
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