Paul Johnston

Yesterday I received three letters from Kingston Hospital in one mailing>

Letter 1 said 'your appointment for 26th October has been cancelled and another fas been made for you on 17th November...........'

Letter 2 said 'your appointment for 17th November has been cancelled and we will contact you with an alternative date.........'

Letter 3 said 'we have made an appointment for 8th November..........' Let us hope that this one sticks.

But really, I am a fairly robust 61 year-old. What would a frail, elderly person make of all this?

Had a letter this morning from the CEO at Kingston Hospital in reply to my complaint of last week. She regrets that I had the need to complain and says she's launching a full investigation into my complaint and will report back by 14th November. She goes on to warn me that information about me will have to be disclosed during the investigation. She also sends me a leaflet about the complaints procedure. All nicely written by computer.

All I want is to know how thw Hospital doesn't apparently take notice of the people who are supposed to make its appointments - and which of the two dates I have now received from different sources for my appointment can be relied upon - if either of them can.

Yesterday (Friday 6th October) I received a letter from Kingston Hospital, posted, by second class mail, on Wednesday 4th, the day before the abortive appointment. This advised me that they had made an appointment for me on 17th November.

This morning (Saturday 7th October) I received another letter from KCAS, the appointments agency, telling me that the appointment has been made for 28th October.

Anyone fancy investing 21 quid in finding out which is right?

This afternoon I had an outpatient appointment at Kingston Hospital at 3 p.m. As I write this I have a letter in front of me to say so.

Because you can't park there I contemplated taking the bus. That goes all around the houses and takes ages and I might be late. So I hired a minicab to take me and bring me home again.

I arrived at 2.30 and reported promptly to Outpatients. The man in the queue in front of me was having a problem. It transpired he had turned up on the wrong day. Then it was my turn. It appeared that, not only had I turned up on the wrong day, but I had turned up in the wrong MONTH.

Kingston Hospital had gratuitously changed my appointment date from 5th October to 17th November and hadn't told me about it.

I was given a number to ring by the receptionist. It purported to be the number of KCAS, the body responsible for making appointments. Fearful of interfering with vital medical equipment I went outside where it was raining and phoned the number on my mobile. It rang...and rang...and rang. Finally it gave up ringing and my mobile told me that there was no reply. I rang my doctor's office. She is on holiday, but the receptionist there verified that the KCAS number was not the one I was given and gave me the right one. I rang it and was promptly answered by a polite young man who told me that I had an appointment with a surgeon this afternoon at 3 p.m. as far as he was concerned - but perhaps the Hospital had changed it.

This is not the first time by any means that Kingston Hospital has, in my personal experience, gratuitously postponed appointments made weeks in advance for serious conditions. I do not believe for one minute that I am the only person who falls victim to this. But I do believe that it is symptomatic of the NHS, which operates on a principle of rationing, where the Service is the Boss and the patient is the supplicant client, whose needs are secondary to the needs of the Service. And it doesn't come cheap...this afternoon's fruitless little jaunt cost me £21 in taxi fares.

Is this the NHS David Cameron was so keen to praise at Bournemouth yesterday?

I gave up smoking (16 to 20 king-size a day) on October 5th 1993 at 10. 35 a.m. in the foyer of the Asda store at Roehampton Vale. I took a pack of B&H with 16 cigarettes unsmoked in it and threw it after some deliberation into a litter bin (whence it was promptly retrieved by an old lady who had observed my deliberations.) I then went to the adjacent pharmacy and bought my first supply of patches. I say this because, although I haven't smoked a single cigarette since that day, I still don't regard myself as a non-smoker and in some ways there has been a price to pay for not smoking in that my metabolism seems to have undergone a profound change. My weight has soared well past the heaviest point it ever reached when I smoked - and it's not because I eat more to make up for not smoking.

Yesterday the House of Commons voted on a free vote to make other people in public or 'semi-public' places and even private members' clubs do what I did voluntarily over 12 years ago. This is obviously in many people's minds a worthy cause;  it will help people give up even in spite of themselves and thus they and everyone around them will become healthier. They will also become wealthier because the price of fags in Britain is now frighteningly higher in real terms than in the days when I smoked.

Isn't this a good thing? Perhaps, but it isn't a cost-free benefit.

The bans on workplace smoking years ago led to smokers leaving the workplace to smoke. I remember running the gauntlet of white coated medical staff on the pavement outside the University Hospital in Richmond VA in the early 90s - the first place I observed the effects of the ban. Staff simply went outside to do it. They do now in Kingston at the Guildhall. When we banned staffroom smoking at school the Head was incredulous when I said that staff who smoked would just leave the premises and smoke outside the gate. They did and the area outside the gate, like the one in Richmond, soon became littered with stubbed out dog ends, hardly adding to the beauty of the area. 

My big concern about bans of this kind imposed by law derives mainly from knowledge of what happened in USA when well-intentioned people secured a similar ban on the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages - 'Prohibition'. The incidence of  alcohol-related disease went UP, not down, as more people were attracted to drink by its very illegality. The distinction between right and wrong, reflected in societies based on Judaeo-Christian ethics for centuries in what the civil law allowed and forbade, was blurred and has never really recovered. Who is going to enforce this ban? The police? If so is there not a risk that even more 'law-abiding' citizens will become alienated from the police than are already so? Prohibition gave American crime a boost from which it still profits and blurred the distinction between criminality and non-criminality. It also achieved the precise opposite of the intention of its framers. Could we not be headed down the same path?