Now I know what it must be like to queue for Taylor Swift tickets with a sense of hopelessness borne out of impending disappointment.
I was hanging on a phone desperate for dates to be confirmed.
It must have felt similar for some Oasis fans, too, when marooned by a mirage of confusion over the band’s recent ticket sales.
Scotland’s Health Secretary Neil Gray was caught up in his own crisis after he joined an online queue for Oasis tickets while chairing a meeting about Alzheimer’s.
But that paled to insignificance when VIP Dons fan Gray popped up at Aberdeen matches in a chauffer-driven government limo.
Were these treats dubious perks of power or legitimate government business?
I think we know the answer after his grovelling apology at Holyrood for being caught out.
Finally, a voice at the end of the line was picked up clearly by my eager ears, but my brain was having trouble processing his words.
“We have no reservations left for the remaining two weeks of November and nothing for the foreseeable future – December’s dates have not been released yet,” the call-handler explained.
“You’ll just have to call back on a regular basis and hope for a cancellation.”
This wasn’t Taylor Swift syndrome, however.
I was simply trying to help my wife rearrange a booking for Covid/Flu-jab boosters with NHS Scotland while cancelling an existing one.
A straightforward process became a monumental task
What started off as a straightforward process suddenly started to look like a monumental task.
Was this just me or are others facing a brick wall, too?
I had visions of this dragging into next year as we were chewed up by the system and spat out again.
Every person in every community in the north and north-east has a stake in how the NHS is performing for them.
Nobody doubts the commitment and compassion of frontline staff.
But is bureaucracy, duplication and confusing interaction between departments still stuck in the 1950s?
As the new Labour Government said, it must “reform” or die.
After cancelling the appointment, we regretted it.
Had we become stateless persons; now we’d cancelled, how would we ever get back on the booking ladder?
In panic, I rang the bookings line again straight away.
The next NHS operative took a similar line about “nothing doing” – except he tried a bit harder and after a lot of false starts scouring around NHS Grampian, he found a vacant appointment a few miles away at Inverurie.
I’d struck gold and bagged it straight away; I felt the same sense of joy as finding a toilet roll on a shop shelf during Covid.
The irony of this experience was that it was all on doctor’s orders: our GP suggested postponing the original booking on medical grounds because the jabs might interact with other ongoing treatment.
Bizarrely, the next day I encountered the same problem all over again.
This time I was simply trying to arrange a fairly important blood test for myself through the network of community clinics in Aberdeen.
Same answer: “Nothing for November, no dates for December yet, keep ringing back.”
Lucky, my own GP practice took pity and invited me in for a test.
Is this a temporary glitch?
But what’s going on?
A temporary glitch or another sign of the NHS under strain? Or maybe Fujitsu is handling the bookings now.
Not surprisingly, it rubs salt into the wounds among patients on horrendous waiting lists if they see Scottish health secretaries swanning about fiddling their expenses (Matheson) or arrogantly taking liberties with taxpayers’ money (Gray).
Especially people like an elderly person I know who used life savings to pay for a cataract operation because he feared going blind while waiting.
And me – I paid for screening after I was told I might have bowel cancer (it would have taken at least five months on the NHS and I couldn’t bear waiting as I’d already been through the trauma of extensive prostate cancer surgery).
It was some type of pre-cancerous growth, “luckily”.
I’m not alone – a lot of desperate people are dipping into their own pockets, but most can’t.
It’s the biggest social crisis of our times.
Yes, reform is crucial; endlessly pouring billions into a black hole doesn’t work.
But health unions are possibly the most powerful in the land and anything perceived as a threat could make this “treatment” very painful.
Gray’s match days were listed on expenses under gobbledegook about “social impact” of investment in sport.
A government spokesperson waffled on about socialising being an essential part of the job for ministers.
Agreed, but not under false pretences.
Gray’s actions exposed a somewhat – er – “grey” area all of his own.
Exploiting his position as though he was a fan rather than a Government minister.
The horrific “social impact” of NHS waiting lists on distraught patients demands his greater attention.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
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