how to manipulate your waiting lists

OK so you live in a big community of students

You personally know hundreds of students

You know that the French and German students routinely go home for operations these days as they all know how long the waits are in the nhs, and how dirty the hospitals are, its amazing within a week of being told by the GP they need to see a surgeon they have been home and had the operation and are often back in class

Compare and contrast with the poor British students, who wait and wait and wait, often past six months for the simplest of procedures

Any complaints about the length of wait are usually met with "oh sorry we sent the appointment card to number 121 big student residence rather than 131 big student residence" which apart from anything else we know for certain to be outright lies because we all see whats in the pigeon holes for all students, and of course there are never any real sanctions against the nhs for such long waits or mistakes

Now when dear readers do we think the biggest peak of appointment cards, inviting the large student population to have their operations, arriving is? Probably something like over 40% of appointment cards all arrive in the same week or two...

Would it surprise you that there is generally a large influx of such cards a week or two into the summer holiday, just when most students have disappeared for 3 months, large percentages to return living at a different address in the student community, and many off to pastures new, but the vast majority never around to see these mythical appointments arrive

Any arriving back to the same address after 3 months will of course have missed these mythical appointments, any moving address will in practise end up having to start the wait from scratch again, many will cry themselves to sleep for months for lack of treatment

Now this large peak of cards arriving, do we congratulate the management of the nhs for manipulating the numbers on their waiting lists down magically, or do we realise that this is just more proof that a top down Stalinist nhs with poor statistics and no patient power is always going to be a shambles?

Of course the nhs looks a bit better in the stats cos their published numbers of the waiting list all go down over summer....