Just hangin' around

While being disabled is a social rather than a medical thing, many of us do have to attend routine hospital appointments for treatment. Kate Monaghan ponders the frustrations of playing the waiting game

Something I find incredibly irritating about having a condition that involves so many different parts of my body, is having to go to so many different specialists at different hospitals. For a start it occasionally makes it difficult to remember where each one is based – yes, I have turned up at the wrong hospital for an appointment and had to dash across town to try to get to the right one in time. I failed, by the way – but mainly it means that I spend a whole lot of time sitting in hospital waiting rooms.

Like me, I’m sure most people have experienced the waiting room anger. First of all it’s the person who comes and sits right down next to you when there are a million other empty chairs. This is really annoying. Then your name gets called out and you think “yes! Bonus, I win, all you fools sitting here waiting and I’m going in first” but then you look up and it’s the nurse, clutching an ominous looking perspex bottle. You walk in, get weighed, measured and then told to go and pee in the bottle. Why didn’t they warn you of this before? I mean, I would have saved some up had I known. Then you have to go back into the waiting room and wait. And wait. And wait.

And, as I’m sat there in the waiting room from hell, I always wonder why I bother to get there on time if it’s always going to run so late. But you know that the one time you are late, as I was after my which-hospital-I’m-meant-to-be-at mix-up, they are running totally on time and I’ve missed my slot. Isn’t there something we could do about this?

Last month I had the pleasure of working on an idea of mine with some developers from Google which we hope that in the future will put an end to all this misery. It’s a small computer programme that would allow patients to find out how long the waiting periods are in certain waiting rooms, as well as allowing people to see which A&E or walk-in centres are closest.

Patient experience is an important part of treatment. Would improving a waiting patient’s experience improve their ability to recover?

It’s a difficult one because investing in the technology to make things better would be a massive thing for the NHS to do, especially in these times of massive budget cuts and austerity across the board. And what technology would be accessible for everyone who needs it? I don’t know what the answer is. I guess we’re all hoping that some kind developers out there might take the project into their own hands and go all “Big Society” and solve it for us without the NHS having to dip into their own pockets at all.