My review does not give this hospital 5 stars

HCA Healthcare UK run the Princess Grace hospital in Nottingham Place Marylebone.

I came down late last night from Inverness and made it home by midnight. I was up at 5am as I usually am, did some work then took the Circle Line to Baker Street to be at the hospital for 9am. I made it by 8.30 am, requested I be shown to my assessment  to the man at reception and was sent off to fill more forms (you do this every time you touch the sides of HSA).

By 9 am, I found myself back of the queue of form fillers and by 9.15am I had no sign of getting closer my paid for session with a nurse. Eventually I found a way to get some attention and by 9.30 am had been taken up the 2nd floor to meet a nurse. Finally someone came to meet me and we got a blood test and ESG done. It took a couple of minutes but I had waited an hour and the nurse was full of apologies.

So was the manager, the assistant manager and the assistant nurse. All seemed upset that I had been ignored but it took the management team another 20 minutes to turn up, they wanted to work out why I had been put in the wrong waiting room and why the man who I originally met at 8.30 only took me upstairs an hour later. The manager informed me that I did not have to fill out more forms as I had done and everyone knew who I was except nobody connected my name with my name on the assessment list.

If this sounds like the kind of bureaucracy that Kafka worried about, then don’t despair, this was incompetence nothing more. But that doesn’t make the situation alright. Incompetence will cost me over £4,300 next Monday and that’s before I pay a consultant and an anaesthetist.

I am having private surgery so that I stop losing blood. Losing lots of blood is giving me anaemia which is making it hard to work as I would like to. The NHS queue for surgery is at least six months. I will pay over £5k to get productive quick – VFM for the consultant and anaesthetists but awful value for money from Princess Grace and HSA, based on the bureaucratic incompetence I’ve been experiencing.

Is this hospital really a flagship for anything? The NHS looked after me properly and I paid for it out of a lifetime’s income tax. This HSA (not its medical staff) appears to be a mess and the Princess Grace Hospital , a dis Grace.  I have paid up front (and immediately I got the bills), now I wish I hadn’t. Much as I like the consultant , I am thoroughly disgusted with the lack of professionalism from an organisation that is charging a fortune.

They took my name , date of birth, email and said they would look into what happened.  I know what happened, nobody was talking to anybody about me and all the conversations I witnessed had nothing to do with getting people better. They were all about bureaucracy and this hospital seems obsessed with limiting the risks they are taking by requiring everything to be documented with absurd numbers of forms requesting the same things, name, email, date of birth (and bank details).

Spending two hours in Princess Grace Hospital, most of it waiting to hear from somebody about whatever I was there to be “assessed” for, was demeaning. This does not happen in GP surgeries or Hospital A&E where at least you are acknowledged as counting.

I suspect that HSA is rather less used to discussing financial compensation than demanding bills be paid upfront. That’s why my bank details weren’t asked by the person who says he will look into my complaint. I have no idea if they have a complaint procedure, I asked to make one and have yet to hear a word in response! Perhaps someone will notice if I send them the blog.

Maybe I will see if they pick up on my dissatisfaction before I have to go to the bureaucracy of their formal complaint procedure. I suspect that they did not breach any of their metrics for satisfactory administration. Such is the range of forms you are asked to complete that I am sure you sign away to any right to human decency.

I had five happy weeks on an NHS ward with no reason to complain, can this organisation not find a way to deal with people as human beings?