John Launer: When outpatient appointments are put on hold

I have a long term medical condition that requires regular hospital review. In theory this should happen every six months. Nowadays, most of the appointment letters or texts I receive from the hospital tell me that my next review has been postponed, usually for a further six months. A series of such delays, beginning before the covid-19 pandemic but extending into it, led at one point to a gap of nearly three years without a face-to-face or phone appointment.Because I’m a doctor and my condition is fairly stable, I can more or less cope with the resulting anxiety. I can access my GP fairly easily when I need to, and not only because I’m a colleague. I also know from the inside how much pressure the NHS is under and how threadbare its fabric has become: it was bad before the pandemic and is dangerously so now. All the same,…
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