"Feedback on perfunctory administration"

Apparently, I had to have a blood test following a routine medicine review. So, I took the trouble (8am lottery) to make an appointment with a GP to agree adding a number of other sensible and timely tests while I was at it (partly because of deep deficiencies in UCH-L1 follow up for an urgent condition). Yet, when I arrived for my blood test I would only have got half these tests done, had I not flagged the agreed additions, because of a discrepancy between the nurse's docket and the online system. And afterwards I could only deduce when my results were available from the series of impertinent sms messages I got from different doctors. To which I was not allowed to respond.

They really don't know me from Adam, and in over 30 years, I have barely seen the same doctor twice. But I have, at one time or another, been sent home to get my affairs in order, and, on another occasion, told I might not survive the night. All nonsense it is as well to be inured to! Which is one reason I take the trouble to record all my own private and NHS records.

Because, the messages I was getting were of that familiar, admonishing, we know something you don't sort. In that same perfunctory, your cholesterol's elevated, take this statin, or Your eGFR is low. You've got Chronic Kidney Disease genre, which is surely the very antithesis of personal patient care, any way you look at it. These are simply unnecessarily, shallow, knee-jerk responses, ill-suited to one-way sms messaging ahead of an appointment.

Anyway, I called the surgery and requested a copy of my results, which the surgery seemed reticent to provide, despite the fact I had been told previously I could just ask for them. In the end, I did get them emailed to me quickly (why isn't this automatic, if they are being openly commented on to me sight unseen?) on condition I accept an appointment to talk to a doctor at the end of the week. Fine. Yet, my results were exactly as I would have expected/hoped. And also much as they have been for over 30 years! When the doctor called (after another reminder sms, which made it unclear whether this was meant to be a personal or phone appointment), he seemed to think I had requested the appointment, not just had it thrust on me. While, despite the fact that the first thing they said was that they didn't know me, they then proceeded to go through all the standard, generic, guidelines, as if they did. Which took no cognisance at all of my individual condition(s), predicament, or preferences. In my opinion, just regurgitated the latest unrefined NHS doctrine, based, as it is, on some sort of blanket, national cost/death minimisation clearing solution. What's the point?

If what patients get for all our trouble is some robotic, dogmatic, coercive, anonymous, one-sided, slow, self-serving, and poorly administered, interpretation of policy. Why not just bring on the real robots via AI? they may actually be able more quickly to interpret policy in the context of individual patient records. And tirelessly assimilate and reconcile all of the (many) conflicting indications and prior conditions. Not just parrot the party line for the sake of back-protection. Who needs the latter? The impression left is that the much vaunted standard of care is there more for the benefit of the provider than the ostensible beneficiaries. Which is especially inapt when every indication is that a more customised approach to patient care is imperative - to cut costs by nipping more problems in the bud, and determining optimal cost-benefit prescriptions and regimens in proper, jointly informed, consultation with the patient.