"Superb medical services - one exception"

In our seventies both I and my wife have in recent years had several times required the services of the NHS. Our hospitals have been the County at Lincoln and the Diana Princess of Wales at Grimsby. The cardiac and orthopaedic clinics at Lincoln have served us well but treatment and hernia surgery as well as Urology clinic services at Grimsby have been class leading examples of how services can be provided. Clinic consultation appointments have often been so efficient that the 40 minutes free parking has covered our car parking needs! The staff at Grimsby are so pleasant and seem to me to be part of a happy workforce bringing to mind the idea that the senior management of our hospitals is of such importance. Good leadership gets good results. The Day Surgery unit at Grimsby simply could not have provided better care for my wife's hernia operation. In the current freeze up they exceeded all expectations and arranged hospital transport to and from the unit doing so on practically a no notice request.

The one exception to our high opinion of the NHS is in the urbancentric mentality of the Lincolnshire Primary Car Trust in respect of out-of-hours G.P. services. Though we have an excellent G.P. surgery some 6 miles distant, twice in 13 years when we needed out of hours assistance the performance has been so bad that no rating could be poor enough to do it justice! That fact is compounded by the typically bureaucratic behaviour of the PCT which furnishes answers which sound as though they were written by a Spin Doctor. Twice we have been given a choice "Drive 50 miles to and from Louth or just get on with being ill on your own". No amount of correspondence with the PCT elicits anything even remotely satisfactory as a response which when translated amounts to "Take it or leave it".