More than two thirds of those appointments that were booked, (66.8%) took place within a week (including 43.0% which took place on the same day of booking). A total of 91,417 patients, however, had to wait more than three weeks from the time they booked the appointment, to it taking place. That works out as almost one in every eight appointments (12.0%) that took place in April. That’s up from 10.5% of appointments in March and 9.8% in February.

The average across England, is that 10.6% of appointments took place more than three weeks after being booked. Counties such as Gloucestershire taking place more than 21 days after booking.

The question in my mind is not about waiting times but what standard of care is being delivered at those appointments. From a local point of view, the majority of state Health provision is initiated by the Okehampton Health Centre, which is, in turn, part of the North Dartmoor Primary Care Network. As with all surgeries, it is funded by the local Integrated Care Board, which in our case is NHS Devon. The ICB divides itself into sub-regions and the NDPCN is at the western (and very rural end) of the Eastern sub-region, which includes, importantly, the City of Exeter. I have written in another article how I consider this leads to an imbalance of attention and consideration, which I contend leads to worse outcomes for patients in the Okehampton area.

However, my concern in this article, is about how I perceive that the Okehampton Health Centre is attempting to tackle the headline figure of long waits for a Doctor's appointment. I contend that the OHC has a straightforward policy - organise the care and attention by arranging that patients are put off asking for an appointment to see THEIR doctor and feed them into a specialised triage system, where either a specialist nurse, practitioner or doctor (without portfolio) deals with the requirement by phone, in the first instance and in person, as a last resort.

If a Patient of OHC contacts the Surgery by one of the new approved means - ideally digitally and on-line - using their new "systmconnect" system - they (and I quote) will now gain access to a "Total Triage solution", where responsibility is allocated to the correct team and priority is flagged automatically. Patients receive replies via their preferred communication route, whether that be a letter, video consultation, phone call, app notification or email. What rubbish! As I will explain later. By my way of thinking, it is a glorious messaging or chatbot system that, with a bit of help from an IT specialist, could have been provided to the Surgery at no appreciable cost at all!

Now lets be absolutely clear about the new system. This software has been developed by a private company called TPP, based in Leeds. TPP is owned by the "Pheonix Partnership". Who owns the Pheonix Partnership? A gentleman by the name of Frank Hester OBE. What do we know about Frank? Well he has been in the news recently. According to his Wikipedia entry, he is and I quote: "The largest ever donor to the Conservative Party ever, having given them £10 million in the year up to March 2024". I have to ask you, why would anyone give that amount of money to a Political Party. The answer has to be as a "Thank You" and a bribe to persuade that Party to do all it can to further the privatisation of our Health Service.

Why might any private business want to become involved with the provision of NHS services - the answer must be for profit. And clearly Systmconnect has obviously made a lot of profits if Frank can give £10m away!

So, immediately, I am not in favour of systmconnect and its use by OHC. As far as I am concerned they are giving away your and my taxes to a private company, which in turn is ending up in the coffers of the Tory Party.

But my criticism of the system goes a lot further. The system is collecting your medical data. We do not know where that data is being stored, whether it is being processed and managed legally, who it is being shared with - for example the Company might be selling it to American insurance companies, which was first highlighted in 2019 and to the best of my knowledge, nothing has been done about that - and finally how you interact with systmconnect allows them to recommend private and potentially costly solutions when waiting times are too lengthy.

Human beings are complex biological and organic machines. As we get older the complexities increase. A digital triage system such as Systmconnect makes one fundamental error! It assumes that we, the patients, know what is wrong with us in the first place. We are asked in this order, on the digital system, to explain what we expect to happen as a result of our contact, how that contact should happen and finally what our symptoms are.

How the heck do we know! How do I know if the pain I have in my left shoulder is a precursor to a heart attack or the fact that I slept awkwardly. In practice, I am not sure that the staff at OHC believe in the system either. My first experience of it, was that despite telling the system that all I was doing was chasing an appointment at the Hospital and a response, by email, would be perfectly sufficient, the surgery rang me and wanted to go over my symptoms with me on the phone. When I started to explain, the lady Doctor said to me and I quote "I don't actually have the time for this conversation". I nearly said, so why did you ignore your new system (for which I am sure you are paying a lot of money - certainly into the tens of thousands of pounds each year) and ring me at all!

So we have a new digital triage system, that is costing our surgery lots of money, that patients cannot understand or properly use (as they are not professionally qualified in self-diagnosis) and that the OHC Staff do not apparently trust or generally believe in.

How did this situation come to pass? I believe, from my years of experience in installing IT systems, I know the answer. Medical Doctors spend many years training and qualifying in medicine. Great! They do not spend years learning how to be business owners and managers. Our system of healthcare puts large surgeries, such as Okehampton Health Centre with its 18,000 patients and dozens of staff, into the situation of being a small business. A business managed by some senior medical Partners. I would not attempt to do brain surgery, so why do Doctors make decisions about computers and software systems. Does our Health Centre believe it has the competence to make these IT decisions, apparently it does. The decisions appear to have been made by a Practice Management Team, purely on the basis that if a whole load of other Surgeries are using the software, it must be OK. 

That is the most fallacious argument for installing a software system, that I can think of. 

I do not know and I would like to know what process the Health Centre went through to establish that this new software was the correct software to be used in this Health Centre. I cannot find any information on the Okehampton Health Centre website that explains how such decisions are made. Do Health Centres, that are spending our money, have a duty to be transparent about how they spend our money and the decisions that they make? I am not sure. My new contact with Devon Healthwatch, will surely give me the answer.