On a waiting list to decide if you get on the waiting list

Date Published: {J}

We all have our stories about the health services and the waiting lists. However, you certainly wouldn’t want to be one of those thousands who had letters of referral sent from their GP to a hospital – and then found that letter left unopened in a box for years.

Well, it was one way of keeping down the numbers on waiting lists for treatment – if unique, irresponsible and potentially damned dangerous. For instance, one presumes that some patients, not having heard back from ‘the system’, might have thought that all was well, or at least not terribly urgent.

Interestingly, from talking to a number of people, such ‘action’ as stuffing letters into a box is not confined to a health service which is definitely sick. You wonder if such extraordinary action is not part of a ‘condition’ built around the belief that if you ignore something, it might go away.

The response conjures up visions of people so much under pressure that someone thought of ‘the box’ for post they simply could not open, or, if they did, no one could do anything about it anyway.

From talking to acquaintances, I have confirmation of something similar and as irrational happening many years ago when letters sent to an organisation were only discovered never to have been opened when a threat of legal action surfaced.

But, from my information, it doesn’t just happen in huge sprawling organisations like a major public hospital, or in a health service so sickly as to be seriously ill. An acquaintance has recounted details to me of a discovery many years ago in a private company where hundreds of letters were found stuffed in a desk when an individual left the employment.

The man appeared to have been working on the basis that, at a certain point in the day, he said to himself ‘well, I have handled all the mail I can handle today’.

The remaining unopened post was put into one of any number of drawers in his desk and literally hundreds of unopened letters came spilling out of every drawer, some of them from years previously, when he left the organisation.

Hiding away letters in a box may in fact be an irrational response to an irrational system which has a built-in inability to respond to a situation in which it finds itself and so resorts to what it calls ‘waiting lists’.

For instance, there is little doubt that we have a health system in which delays and waiting lists are an inescapable part of the norm . . . how else could one explain 150,000 on the waiting lists. ‘Initiatives’ like hiding the letters in a box may be just one crazy possible response born of utter desperation.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.