"Inefficiency and waste of resources"

After waiting since the beginning of October, I had an appointment to see a specialist at West Suffolk Hospital for a date in late February.  After missing a possible telephone call from the hospital on Friday, I received a text message informing me that the appointment was cancelled, this was followed by an email saying the same thing.  OK, I felt well informed.

The day following the cancelled appointment, I received a text telling me I have an appointment letter and instructing me to log onto my NHS account.  That was efficient, I thought, to send a rearranged appointment letter so quickly.  I had to read the letter twice to make sure I was not mistaken, but no I was not, the appointment letter was a formal letter informing me of the cancellation.  Why is it necessary to inform me of the same thing in 3 different ways? My mistake, four different ways, because on Monday I received a hard copy of the previous letter through the post.

If this was not bad enough, this morning I received a second letter, just to make certain I realised that the appointment I had not attended before, had really been cancelled.  The irony is that this letter came after a text message today, informing me of the new date in six weeks time.  It will be interesting to see how many more messages there will be on the same theme.

If my experience is standard, I feel that time and money is being wasted on this inefficient approach.