Glam
Mad Cat Woman
Yes, I know, it's a day late. Chemo kicking in a bit.
Yesterday I spent 6 hours in a chemo-therapy chair for a two hour treatment. The reason being the new computer system in the hospital had thrown a wobbler. This meant my blood tests from 2 days ago were gone, so I had to have another prior to treatment.
This system has been in for three weeks, ‘The worst three weeks I’ve ever had in this job,’ the nurse told me. ‘Patients records, treatments, pharmacy notes just keep disappearing off the screen.’
Imagine how dangerous that could be in a chemo-therapy room.
Curious I asked if this new software was produced ‘in house’ at the NHS. ‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘All that disappeared years ago. It’s bought in privately from an American company, but it seems incompatible with NHS ways of doing things.’
So after six hours (started prior to 1000 and finished just after 1600 hours) I was released back into the world.
Have no complaints about the staff or the treatment, they ran about like blue arsed flies and they all looked tired, if still good humoured …(I suspect medical humour is a bit like infantry humour. Dark, and a way to deal with it when things get rough.)
But, call me cynical if you like, I suspect this creeping privatization is mostly driven by brown envelopes being slid across the polished surfaces of meeting room tables. Somebody somewhere wants a bloody good kick up the arse. (Let's start at the top, and prune downwards for a change.)
OK, rant over. Put it down to chemo aftermath. (I still f****** mean it though.)
We use something called RIO. I have no idea what the County use. Ours is also used by Redwoods over in Shrewsbury and various other members of staff employed by St.Georges. It was also used by the George Bryan centre and I think Margaret Stanhope before both closed.My OH is a CA in private sector maintaining and selling IT to a hospital trust at the moment. Only one hospital trust mind you, because they aren't allowed to have a joined up system.
We can get blood results from the County, because they're on ICE.
We can't see Countys thing, they can't see ours.
Last week, the whole computer thing went down, the server was blamed, it was bliss. We weren't beholden to the machine in front of us for hours and hours. But we had a mad rush to input everything when it came back on at 5am.
How nice it would be to be able to communicate to other hospitals online.