On the face of it, using the Internet to choose and book a hospital consultant appointment seems a fantastic idea. But as with most government projects, defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory.
It seemed so simple, I need to see an ophthalmic consultant to check my eyes are ok after laser surgery. So I received a letter through the post with a reference and password to use the optimistically named ‘Choose and Book’ service run by the NHS. Sounded too good to be true, so I went to the web page where I had to enter my reference, birth year and password. Bingo! it quickly pulled back the details of the appointment and asked me to click to go on to book a time. I excitedly clicked the link, expecting to see a calendar of available dates and hoping to do one or at most two more clicks to choose and confirm.
How wrong I was, I was actually then taken to the complicated home page of the hospital concerned, and after a couple of moments hunting round finding what to do next I saw the ‘Choose and Book’ link. OK so it was a bit manual and not integrated and added an extra step, but I was still optimistic. Slowly, so slowly the link stuttered into life and low and behold I was back at the original login page …. strange … oh well a bit more manual work, I suppose they are being thorough, so I entered the details again, but was greeted with an error … ‘unable to log you in at this time’. The site suggested I go back to the original link and start again.
Annoyed, I did so, and went through the whole process again, to get the same error. Finally I gave in and called the phone booking system. They checked and the error wasn’t that I couldn’t log in, rather there were no available appointments, but it reports the login failure instead. So I ended up wasting time on a system that is poorly designed and implemented.
Not only that, but they can’t take user feedback unless its from a GP surgery, who surprisingly don’t use the same system ….
