Nothing in the NHS is straightforward any more
Yesterday, I discovered I had completely run out of my anti-depressants and would need to pester the GP surgery for an urgent prescription. The secretary was fine about it, but said I’d need to have an urgent doctor’s appointment as their computer system wouldn’t allow them to hand me a repeat prescription that was due. They didn’t know why.
This kind of thing has happened since we’ve had computer systems, and even before. I get it all the time. But the NHS is legitimately getting more confusing.
When I last saw a psychiatrist, it was not at the [local area] Community Mental Health Team. It was at NHY 2-6 *. That’s the new name for it. The psychiatrist introduced himself as an ‘SP4 doctor’. When I asked him what this meant, he said “What used to be called a registrar”. It’s fine if they want to reorganise things, but could they not at least name them with words rather than just numbers and letters?!
I’m helping out with a charity project called ‘Christmas for CAMHS‘. The only issue with the name is that I worry that many people don’t know what CAMHS is. It stands for ‘Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services’. ‘Child Psychiatry’, in old fashioned language. If you know what CAMHS is, it’s a very nicely straightforward name for the project: we donate Christmas presents to children in mental hospitals.
You may notice I’m not so keen on the change from ‘psychiatry’ to ‘mental health’. I realise ‘psychiatry’ is starting to sound old fashioned, linking it with old fashioned horrible attitudes to mental illness. But it often sounds euphemistic. Patients are often described as ‘having mental health’. Here, the word ‘health’ means ‘illness’. We all have health, but apparently when it comes to the mind we won’t dare say ‘illness’. No one has ever described the problems with my legs by saying “She has leg health.” Thank goodness.
I feel like such an old fogey.
Then there’s the way the mental health services in my area have been organised, which means it’s very difficult to use more than one service at once. I appreciate this might be a bit unusual, but not totally radical or the kind of thing you need to stop happening by accident. It’s also very difficult to find and contact mental health wards as part of Christmas for CAMHS because information online is often out-of-date or completely non-existent.
I’m already ill. I don’t need the exhaustion of trying to work out who is doing what with my healthcare.
*This is not actually the name, because that would reveal whereabouts I live. But it’s a similarly incomprehensible sequence of numbers and letters: I have no idea what it stands for.
Mad In the UK 