Remember my complaints about delays at St Bart’s, and wondering how they could be so badly behind schedule already early in the day?

Yesterday I went to St Bart’s again, and was seen about 40 minutes after the appointed time. But that’s not the interesting part of the visit.

The interesting part was seeing, by chance, a summary of the doctor’s appointments calendar for the next 8 or 10 days on which he was seeing patients. I think he is only there once a week, so this would represent the next 2 months of appointments, although the scale doesn’t really matter here.

Out of those 8 or 10 occasions, 1 was blocked out, 2 were marked OB 1 for “1 overbooked”, 1 was marked OB 2, and the rest marked simply FULL.

If that is at all representative, at least 30% of his days are overbooked weeks in advance. It probably only gets worse closer to the time. No wonder he’s behind schedule every time I see him!

While I was there, the receptionist came in to ask what to do about booking a follow-up for another patient. There was obviously no space in the calendar, yet the patient needed an appointment. (That’s why the calendar printout was brought up.) So the doctor unblocked that single blocked day which he’d apparently kept as a reserve.

Time management the NHS way: time is a flexible, relative thing, to be stretched until it covers everything that’s needed.