Source

2022 will surely be even worse, seeing that yesterday we had an all-time high of nearly 80,000 confirmed cases in just one day

See: Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young

Source data: NHS (official)

Data source: NHS

My interpretation: The vaccines did lower the numbers, but not by much. Number patients in mechanical ventilation beds right now: 900+. Same time last year (before AZ mass vaccination): 1,200+.

It’s an improvement, but not a massive improvement. Considering we now know a lot more about how to treat COVID-19 patients.

I keep watching the excess deaths/mortality figures, which are summarised in a weekly report here (updated every Thursday).

It’s not about bashing anything, it’s about analysing the data to understand the science and reject dogmatic business marketing.

AST month I raised a formal complaint, which I also wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] after I had spent an unimaginable amount of time unearthing a scandal. It’s an ongoing problem which apparently impacts 10,000-20,000 patients in England. That number comes from an operator (on-call), revealing information which management was likely reluctant to divulge.

After weeks of waiting, and within the window of response time initially promised (20 working days), I finally received the following letters this week:

• MAN00018988 Complaint Cover Letter
• MAN00018988 Complaint Report

The names in these letters are of reasonably high level people, hence not a privacy issue (unlike before). For the public record, here are the contents:

Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service
Telephone: 0161 xxxxxxxx
Email: xxxxxxxxchester.gov.uk
PO Box 532, Town Hall, Manchester, M60 2LA

Dr Roy Schestowitz
xxxxxxxxxxxxxitz.com

6 December 2021

Dear Dr Schestowitz

Ref: MAN/00018988

Thank you for your complaint dated 15 November 2021 regarding Yorkshire Health Solutions.

Following receipt of your complaint, an investigation was commenced on my behalf by Niall Bancroft, Complaints Officer.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to bring your concerns to our attention and I sincerely hope you have found my response to be helpful in addressing your complaint. If you should have any questions that you would like to discuss further after you have read this letter, please do not hesitate to contact Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service on 0161 xxxxxx or via email: xxxxxchester.gov.uk

However, if you are dissatisfied with the response to your complaint and do not wish to allow us the opportunity to resolve with you any outstanding concerns, you also have the right to ask the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to review your case. The Ombudsman can be contacted at: https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/making-complaint or by telephone on 0345 xxxxx

The Ombudsman service is independent of the Council and NHS and is the final stage of the complaints process. The Ombudsman may decide to investigate your complaint, or will provide you with reasons why they will not, according to their role and powers. During their investigation, they will ask questions of the organisation regarding your complaint. We will fully cooperate with their enquiry to enable them to make a decision as to whether we have acted unfairly in our service provision, or in considering your complaint. Once you refer your complaint to this service, we will be unable to transact with you about this complaint, and any further contact concerning it will be between the Ombudsman directly.

Please do not hesitate to contact our team if we can provide any further assistance or clarification.

Yours sincerely

Ian Williamson
Chief Accountable Officer

Web site: www.mhcc.nhs.uk

The report:

Ref: MAN/00018988

Enquiry by Dr Roy Schestowitz

Complaint investigation undertaken by Niall Bancroft, NHS Complaints Officer, Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service.

Thank you for your correspondence dated 15 November 2021 concerning communication issues with Yorkshire Health Solutions, as you were on hold for 4 hours, when you called the service, but were still unable to reach anyone.

As part of my investigation I have received information from:

• Ms Joanne Holgate, Director, Yorkshire Health Solutions (YHS)

I have now investigated the issues you have raised, and I have outlined the findings of my investigation below.

Ms Holgate would like to thank you for bringing your experience to her attention and would like to apologise for the distress caused. Yorkshire Health Solutions (YHS) take care to ensure that important matters such as this, when acceptable standards have not been met, are investigated, and managed appropriately.

YHS have trialled different methods for their telephone system and acknowledge that it is an ongoing issue, which they are continuously in discussion about with their telephony provider. YHS appreciate this is extremely frustrating for patients trying to contact the service and Ms Holgate can assure you that they are looking into this issue as a matter of urgency.

To improve the communication with patients, regarding wait times for calls to be answered, YHS trialled using an automated wait time on the voice message; however, this was constantly changing due to the length of the previous call. Since then, YHS have now initiated a queue function on their telephone systems, which states the position the patient is in the queue for their call to be answered.

In addition to the queue function, due to the high volume of calls the service is receiving, YHS have created an email through which patients can request a call back. YHS have designated some staff to answering telephone calls, whilst other staff solely respond to emails. The service is receiving a large number of emails per day, and Ms Holgate is sorry if you have contacted them via email and not had a timely response, but Ms Holgate would like to assure you they do aim to respond to all emails within 5 working days. The email address you can contact YHS on is xxxxxsolutions.co.uk

Finally, YHS have also changed the way they work with regards to patients contacting the service to make an appointment. Going forward, to improve the speed and efficiency of the booking process, YHS will contact patients initially to book their appointment rather than patients having to contact YHS.

I understand you have now been provided with an appointment, which I am glad to hear; however, I appreciate this will still not change your experience and it is not acceptable you had to face such long waits on hold, in trying to secure this appointment and I sincerely apologise for this.

Once again, Ms Holgate also passed on her sincere apologies for the update and distress caused and would like to assure you YHS is actively working to improve patient experience. Your complaint has been invaluable to enable YHS to continue to improve their services.

YHS have fully upheld your complaint and, because of your complaint and to prevent a recurrence, the following actions have been implemented:

• YHS have created an email through which patients can request a call back.
• YHS have changed the way the service works with regards to patients contacting the service to make an appointment. Going forward, YHS will contact patients initially to book their appointment rather than patients having to contact YHS.

I do hope you feel your complaint has been thoroughly investigated; however, if you remain dissatisfied with this response, the cover letter attached to this complaint report provides further details on next steps.

Niall Bancroft
NHS Complaints Officer
Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service, on behalf of Manchester Clinical
Commissioning Group

Let’s hope that my efforts will at least improve the experience of other people across the country.

Comparing like with like?

Source URL

AST week I wrote about my experiences [1, 2, 3, 4] with The ‘Care’ Gateway and YORKSHIRE ‘HEALTH’ ‘SOLUTIONS’ LTD. Based on my experiences this month, Tories are not killing the NHS. They’ve ALREADY killed it. It’s not the NHS failing; it’s the privatisation that’s failing, or failing patients. Do these private firms think it is acceptable that in order to book an appointment one needs to wait in a queue for over 4 hours? On a non-free line? It has now been 8+ days and the private firm, YORKSHIRE ‘HEALTH’ ‘SOLUTIONS’ LTD, has not even responded to my E-mails (about 4 of them), let alone offered to book an appointment. It’s like they don’t even exist. I’ve got an open complaint about this company with the Manchester authorities. Ignoring attempts to book an appointment is done at their own peril and I’ve been told I’m not alone. Other people too are having very negative experiences. As it turns out, other “providers” are also unresponsive; The ‘Care’ Gateway’s Team Leader (one of about 3), Samantha, admitted this along with subordinates. And they cannot seem to get hold of their very own providers. I should know, I have just spent a lot of time on the phone with them. And it’s nothing technical, this is POLITICS and bureaucracy. What a waste of NHS time/resources. In the past it wasn’t anything like this; it’s like one ends up speaking to lawyers instead of doctors, or middlemen for businesses instead of care professionals. In this post I will mention a couple of first names, which I did not wish to do (but escalating as it has been nearly 10 days now without concrete progress).

I’ve just spent another 40 minutes on phone with a person (The Care Gateway). Sole outcome: Team Leader (Sharon) will phone me back by the end of the day. Initially she said “24 hours” as if that means anything… when they work 9 to 5 (or until 6). Still no appointment, still no solution. Over a month since GP referral. What a train wreck. They’re only making things worse. They waste NHS resources dealing with obscene levels of incompetence. The sorts of things that didn’t happen prior to privatisation.

The NHS is fast becoming rather useless to me, and likely not for any reason other than planned ‘failure’. Planned… because the government wants it to seem like the NHS is failing, in turn offering privatisation as the ‘solution’ (even if the privatisation itself is the core problem).

As a friend put it, “it is planned failure used to drive patients into corporate treatment facilities and thus stoke the statistics so they can claim increased demand and cut more. Here they even subsidize the privatized facilities at the expense of treating the population.”

I said, “bear in mind this is ALREADY a private companies, propped by up tax money, so I am trying to get it blacklisted by NHS…”

The friend retorted: “So they are bleeding one company further in order fund even less efficient companies. Profit in services means that either people were overcharged or underserved or both.”

“So if NHS is already a private company then it is already overcharging and underserving, on top of the overcharging and underserving the secondary companies cause.”

I will update this post or write a follow-up after Sharon (the manager) phones, assuming that she does (they made empty promises before). Notice how bad a treatment; in the past 9 days I spent about 6 hours on the phone, after waiting about a month since referral. To see a GP that’s another barrier, and one cannot get a referral without first meeting a GP. So unless one throws oneself at the ER, treatment or diagnosis can literally take months! Yes, months!

Privatisation kills; the people who perpetrate this are sick sociopaths. There’s no medical treatment for sociopathy.

Well, the sole upside of all this is that I get a first-hand account of the epic failure of privatisation, which I shall document.

Update (4PM): So Sharon has just phoned me, saying she had spoken to YORKSHIRE ‘HEALTH’ ‘SOLUTIONS’ LTD, saying they would phone back by the end of the day to arrange an appointment. So, in summary, it took just over 9 days for this to happen (assuming they will in fact phone later). She cautioned there’s a big backlog, depending on place. Either way, after about 7-8 hours on the phone and many E-mails I may merely get an appointment booked. Some “service”, some “care”, some “solution”, eh? At this snail pace we’re talking about months to see a specialist.

Update (5:10PM): I finally received a call, almost at 5PM sharp. My findings about it are as follows:

- There seems to be a company or agency handling the bookings, or maybe not contracted outwards but merely a subdivision
- The person I spoke to was reasonably new on the job and was not aware of some of the most basic things, such as what’s on the company’s own Web site (imagine that! I know their site better than her!)
- The backlog for bookings wasn’t as severe as they might have people believe. In fact, a booking was possible for tomorrow (although it’s past 5PM, so technically she could not do it) or Friday
- Remember she phoned me only because I had escalated the matter and spoke to managers 3-4 times on the phone already (plus a similar number of calls to people below them). It rook 9 days of calls and waiting.
- Initially the booking was offered for a place rather far away, not even bearing the company’s own name, let alone anything “Yorkshire”. What is going on here?!?! Is this like a massive network or a chain of private companies? This one is at 9 Maple Road, near the Co-op (M23 9RL) and it’s known as “Woodland Medical Practice”.
- For a 10-minute ultrasound scan I needed to spend about 8 hours on the phone (all in all), just to book an appointment. This isn’t acceptable. It’s also wasting a ton of manpower. It’s the least efficient thing I’ve ever experienced in the UK, not just the NHS.
- The lack of response was acknowledged to me as a widespread issue, affecting a huge number of people.
- They are aware of the problem, but they are apprehensive about the patients finding out about it. Why not admit it upfront?
- They took over a company (the person on the phone cannot even name it, probably because she genuinely does not know its name)
- The company whose “business” they ‘took over’ caused a massive backlog of about 10,000-20,000 patients. The number isn’t made up. That’s what she told me on the phone.
- The company and those patients were added 3 weeks ago or one month ago, i.e. around the time of the referral. That sounds pretty insane and it leaves people in critical need of care in a bad state. They might even die before receiving any treatment or diagnosis. This isn’t an order of merchandise or consumerism, this is people’s lives.
- The lady I spoke to admitted they’re struggling to even read and respond to E-mail. She downplayed this issue and made some mutually-contradicting statements in the process.
- People waiting on the line for 4 hours is apparently not so outlandish. So what if I’m one of thousands of people subjected to such (dis)service levels?