simont | Medical bureaucracy

Addenbrookes appear to be nearly organised these days, IME, but the last few times I've dealt with my GP's surgery I have found phrases such as ‘piss-up’, ‘brewery’ and ‘wet paper bag’ unfailingly springing to my mind.

So I've recently been trying to get a repeat prescription for some gluten-free staple foods. This involved:

going into town on Wednesday lunchtime and being startlingly unable to find the surgery.
going in again on Thursday morning armed with better directions, finding the surgery's new premises, and dropping off the form.
going in on Friday morning and finding I was a working day early: they take 48 hours to renew a prescription. I probably knew that once, but it's been a while and nobody thought to remind me.
going in again this morning and finding they had declined to renew my prescription. Probably, they said, because it was overdue for review; but the receptionist couldn't find that out for sure, and in fact the doctors never confirmed the reason either. It didn't seem to me that much medical review ought to be necessary in this particular case, but I was willing to work with the bureaucratic requirement if I had to.
arranging an appointment on short notice to rectify this.
wandering around town for half an hour, coming back, and seeing a medical student who was supposed to be supervised by a GP, who was absent.
talking to the medical student for twenty unproductive minutes before the supervising GP bothered to turn up and authorise him to prescribe anything.
finding that the surgery thought they'd filled half my repeat prescription, but couldn't find it, and it might have been sent to Boots non-consensually. No indication of why they might have done one half but not the other half.
receiving both halves of my prescription, with instructions to have the disputed half shredded if it turned out to have already been filled by Boots.
going to Boots, who hadn't heard of it.
getting to work over an hour late.

So, I now have some actual prescriptions in my back pocket, and will drop them in at a slightly more convenient Boots on the way home from work. The other copy of one of them is still unaccounted for; I predict that some completely random pharmacy will turn out to have got it by accident, and will send me a letter in a month's time asking if I can please come and pick up my stuff. That's what happened the last time I was prescribed anything (which is one of the reasons it's been so long since I had to go through this!).

On the plus side, they've shown me how to request repeat prescriptions over the web, but really I'll have to do a lot of those before the cumulative saving in hassle manages to outweigh this week's sheer confusion.

Also, during the half hour before my appointment I wandered around town doing some hasty shopping, and was rather scared by the queue outside Northern Rock. It reached most of the way down Sidney Street, and there was a guy who looked like a newspaper photographer snapping away at it with a camera the size of a trumpet.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Last time my gf got a repeat prescription, she sropped it off on a Tuesday, they said it would take 48 hours. She said, "OK, I'll pick it up on Saturday, then". Saturday comes. We wander into town. The surgery stopped opening on a Saturday 9 months previously (used to open for emergency appointments and picking up prescriptions). Would have good if that had been mentioned.

They cannot treat their own arse-elbow dysphoria, never mind anybody else's problems...

That's an excellent phrase. I idly wonder if it might also look good with "arse-elbow" rendered into poncy medical Latin of some sort, but possibly it's better as it is :-)

Google suggests that rectum and cubit are the relevant words. Recto-cubitary dementia?

Hm, I like "cubitary" very much but I would[1] have thought "arse" meant "buttocks" slightly more than it meant "rectum"[2], so "gluteal-cubitary dysphasia" would seem more appropriate, and I prefer the way it sounds too :)

[1] Being the sort of person who nitpicks the use of crude slang
[2] In fact, I think it means the whole area, including both. I have a similar objection to anatomical translations of words like "crotch" -- "crotch" refers to the whole area (because in casual conversation that's generally what you mean) which can be translated most accurately into more precise anatomical terms in different ways in different contexts. I don't know why people who think slang words have a more precise meaning do -- it generally doesn't seem to be supported by the usage :)

I used very refined slang, thank you very much :p

Gluteal = buttocks [muscles]
Rectum = end of digestive system
Natal cleft = gap down the middle
I choose gluteal, because it's the biggest part, and gives the impression of maximal foolishness if you can't distinguish that from an elbow.

I used very refined slang, thank you very much :p

:)

I choose gluteal, because it's the biggest part, and gives the impression of maximal foolishness if you can't distinguish that from an elbow.

That's an interesting point, actually. I totally agree with the bigness being the important thing.

But I've a feeling that it's not just because they're totally different, but because they have tangential points of similarity (as evinced by the arse/elbow picture quizes), so have a tantalizing suggestion of possibility which two completely incompatible objects wouldn't, that gives it a greater suggestion of stupidity.

But I've no idea if that was meant in the genesis of the phrase or if I just imagined it myself. If it is an aspect, it would be another argument in favour of "gluteal", which influenced me if not anyone else :)

Recto-cubitary agnosia?

Gluteo-radial dysphoria?

Hmm, it has been suggested at this end that ulno-gluteal dysphoria may be more accurate.

Radius, ulna, potato, potatoe. Sort of.

Hmm. Also, I'm now confused about whether "dysphoria" was the right word. By analogy with "gender dysphoria", I assumed you were using it to mean "confusion" or "uncertainty" or some such, and hence thought it was an exellent choice; but according to Wikipedia it actually means something more like "unhappiness" – it's the antonym of "euphoria". So the literal meaning of "gender dysphoria" is "unhappiness about gender", not "confusion about gender"; and really for the arse-elbow case one wants a word that specifically means confusion of some sort.

(Yes, I am bored, well spotted :-)

The NHS are unhappy about their arses and elbows :( poor NHS. Yes, we want a different word to dysphoria, don't we...

The BBC already has photos of people queueing outside the Cambridge branch on Friday so I'm not in the least surprised someone's there today taking more.

Time to move surgeries?

(I wonder if people in the queue were getting distracted and going into Galloway and Porter. I know I would.)

Why queue to withdraw your money when you could just go and spend it all on books? :-)

Ah, good point. You might only be able to withdraw so much from cash machines, but if you can put n-ty bricks of gold on your card... :)

OK, so Northern Rock has the Bank of England as a lender of last resort when customers suddenly withdraw all their money, but who's Galloway and Porter's supplier of last resort when customers suddenly buy all the books? The British Library?

I suspect they may be able to get more books fairly easily. So long as people paid for them.

In the normal sense, yes.

But 250 million books at 24 hours' notice could still be a tall order.

Aha, just remembered that I meant to come back to this. No, they weren't, because the queue went down the street from the NR building, rather than up, and hence didn't go past G&P at all. Clearly a tactical error on the part of the people who started the queue :-)

Dr Khong was *very* angry the last time the secretaries "cocked up" (his words!) my repeat prescription, FWIW. He's a fantastic guy.

Isn't he? :)

So far I haven't been messed around in the way that Simon has, but then I have been haunting the place for the last 2 years by comparison.

I met him for the first time this morning. He does seem pretty cool, yes :-)

Gosh, that's actually really quite poor.

My surgery does fine with repeat prescriptions, but specialises in thoroughly unpleasant twentysomething female doctors who refuse to take my issues seriously on the grounds they're not politically correct from a feminist point of view...

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