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Living in the past

Posted By MrFraggle

"Living in the past"

About: St John's Hospital / Head and Neck

(as a service user),

Got a phone call yesterday asking if I want to take advantage of a cancellation my surgeon had this week. Only a minor op but yep why not.

I was told the time to be at St Johns and what ward.

Then things got silly because much of NHS Lothian still resides in the 20th century. I asked if the guy from the appointments office could confirm the details and provide all the other information one normally gets from a surgical procedure notification but no he could not do this as he was not allowed. I did manage to find out when to start fasting but that was it.

I do get some appointments via secure email and have done so for a few years now and was told by someone in the NHS Lothian IT department that this facility would be rolled out accross NHS Lothian, 5/6/7 years later it is still only a very small number of departments that have this facility.

I wonder if the promised free WiFi has finally been fully rolled out in one of the last health board in the UK to provide it?

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Responses

Response from Jeannette Morrison, Head of Patient Experience, NHS Lothian 4 years ago
Jeannette Morrison
Head of Patient Experience,
NHS Lothian

Submitted on 14/08/2019 at 08:43
Published on Care Opinion at 08:43

Dear MrFraggle

Thank you very much for sharing your feedback with us via Care Opinion. I have had the opportunity to share your feedback with the eHealth Team and they have helped me with my reply.

I was pleased to hear that you were able to accept a cancellation for your surgery and I hope that you are recovering well from this.

I have heard back from the eHealth Progamme Manager and I am told that it is routine practice to share with patients their fasting and admission details, however we would not routinely share this information by email.

I understand that there are now approximately 150 individual services where digital communication can be made with patients which is why you have been able to receive some digital communications and not others. This does remain a work in progress for us due to the size of our organisation but l can appreciate that it can be frustrating for patients.

NHS Lothian is working hard to implement WiFi across the organisation and this service currently provides a connection for 1,500 concurrent users on a daily basis, including St. John’s. Additional sites are incrementally being added as part of the wider deployment of Wireless Networking around the organisation.

Thank you again for sharing your feedback with us and I hope that you are well on the mend.

With best wishes

Jeannette

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by MrFraggle (a service user)

Not sure I understand the paragraph concerning eHealth, when we received notification of a hospital admission the letter is usually accompanied by a booklet on the General anaesthetic procedures and a booklet covering everything else including when to begin fasting which is based on the time frame of the operation.

Because I accepted a cancellation appointment by phone I did not receive any of this information, even the admissions clerk was really not clear, why this general information is not available online and perhaps accessed via link provided by NHS Lothian along with a confirmation email of appointment time is quite ridiculous given the amount of time, years, that it seems to be taking NHS Lothian to provide digital communication to us the patients. I received a letter confirming the appointment on the day of my operation, in fact I would have been in the ward when it was delivered, the letter was not accompanied by the two booklets mentioned earlier.

Given what I have read, I hardly think NHS Lothian has performed particularly well in rolling out wifi.

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