Self Scan Kind of Life

Originally published on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

Recently I've been thinking that with the rise of the self scan and self service machines, and with the impending closure of the entire high street, you may laugh but you won't be laughing in five years time when the high street resembles a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie, that we appear to be heading for a self service life.

Firstly I blame the supermarkets for this, or more importantly all those people who wondered how amazing it would feel to scan their own food just the once, well that came back to kick you in the face didn't it, because now the chance of getting served by a real person is about as remote as finding a unicorn in the Sahara desert.

Although they do come with their perks, because lets be honest some times you wonder how the person serving you managed to get a job in customer service as they send a scowl in your direction, whilst scanning your vegetables because you disturbed them. However if I had to sit there and scan someone's ten bottles of wine knowing they were off to a party I think I'd be annoyed too.

But despite this one minor perk of the self scan, we now find ourselves regularly shouting at machines in the supermarket because there's an "unexpected item in the bagging area," which was once reserved for your own living room when your computer told you that you'd "performed an illegal operation.'

The worrying thing is though, we seem to have become our own shop assistants when in store, in Ikea there's a machine so you can locate an item in store so you don't disturb the otherwise overly busy staff. In Argos there's also a self-service machine so you can go and sit on those horrible little chairs and stare at you item on the shelf for ten minutes before they call your name.

Even though the high street may die a death, machines powered by us will probably run the shops that remain open. But this technique of doing things ourselves appears to be running into other areas of our lives.

Just look at hospitals and doctors surgeries. I have spoken before about how difficult it is to get an appointment at a doctors surgery, in fact by the time you get there you'll probably have already recovered from your illness or died a horrible yet convenient death for your GP. But just in case the wait at A&E is too long or your problem isn't that serious and you can't get into your GP surgery for another six weeks, there's always NHS direct.

Anyone who's used the NHS direct system, either online or by telephone will tell you that it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. When you phone you can sometimes be on hold for about thirty minutes, if not a full hour, and if you check online the categories and questions are so vague that you end up being told you have bubonic plague.

After this mass struggle to find out what is wrong with you via this efficiently rubbish system, the person on the other end of the phone or the computer usually tells you to make an appointment with your GP or go the A&E anyway, rendering the whole experience pointless.

Although during the journey into the self scan life, some people bypassed the whole NHS direct thing and became self-diagnosing self-trained doctors, well if you can become a shop assistant yourself why not a doctor?

This has then lead to a nation, if not a world population turning into a bunch of screaming hypochondriacs who think they have some weird sub-tropical disease that hasn't existed since 1906 because they Googled 'what is wrong with me if I have a red rash on my stomach.' Basically no matter what your symptoms, Google is going to tell you you're dying, no matter what.

Certain aspects of our lives such as doing the weekly shop or popping to Argos or Ikea have become the first casualties to the self-service lifestyle. But I wonder how long it will be before we are doing everything ourselves? If we've already began developing into Google trained doctors, who knows what else will come next in our ever evolving self-scan/self-service kind of life.

Dying for an Appointment

Originally published on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

For a while now I've been seeing a number of debates online surrounding medical care in the UK, whether its about budget cuts, the issue of privatising the NHS or a number of problems surrounding the treatment of patients, which largely concentrates on the negative aspects of care some people have received. However something I rarely see, which is something that I've experienced recently, is the complexities of trying to get an appointment with your GP.

Recently after experiencing some problems I contacted my doctor's surgery to try and book an appointment, this to me seemed like a very straightforward task that would involve a telephone call and arranging the appointment. I'd already considered the fact that I may have to wait a few days, but as usual nothing is completely straightforward.

During my telephone conversation I was told that the earliest appointment I could have was the 1 March, which would have been fine if it was a few days before. However I just happened to be ringing three weeks before the given date, which to me seemed very strange. When I enquired about getting an earlier appointment I was told that they were fully booked until then, a phrase I thought was reserved for hotels, restaurants, hairdressers and the sort. Then when I mentioned that I'd been having a pain in my chest the receptionist, in a very rude manner, told me I should go straight to the hospital before saying goodbye and hanging up.

After this happened I was in total shock. I know if you experience pains in your chest then you should go to the hospital, but as the pain had been happening for a few days I was quite sure it wasn't a heart attack, hence my delay in approaching the hospital. It's also worth noting that a few months back when my partner had experienced extreme chest pains and we went to the hospital, he was told at A&E he should have gone to his local GP first. Talk about mixed messages.

The whole situation is baffling as it would appear the GP surgery expected me to predict and schedule the days that I was ill, I know this isn't the case but given the way I was told they were fully booked this is how it felt. I was also rudely told on the phone that to get a quicker appointment I would have to ring the next morning at 8am, which tells me and anyone else who has experienced this that the GP surgery did in fact have appointments, which they could hand out instead of making countless potential patients angrily tap away at their phones the next morning in an appointment bidding war.

I have actually done this before and it took around 68 engaged phone calls in four minutes before I actually got through to a person, at which point I couldn't get an appointment until 4pm.

Now many may blame this type of treatment on budget cuts or privatisation, but for as long as I can remember it has been like this. I can even remember my own mother enduring the telephone bidding war when I was younger to try and gain an appointment for the illness that she had so inconsiderately miss-scheduled.

It is a sad state of affairs that many people who are unwell and may in fact have a more serious underlying condition have to wait weeks on end to see their GP, by which time it could be too late. You could go to the hospital where like I previously mentioned you will be told you should have seen a GP first, be made to feel like you're wasting valuable hospital time and resources only to find out that there's nothing to worry about. You also get to find this out after an eight-hour wait, which is always a lovely experience.

Sadly there's nothing that can be done, and it looks like this is going to continue if the frightful news stories about the NHS and doctor's surgeries are to be believed. However I did file a complaint with the surgery on the day that I was denied an appointment as there was no room at the inn, but as you may have guessed I'm still waiting for a reply, which I won't hold my breath for as I may not be able to get an appointment for the lack of oxygen in body whilst doing so.