Saturday 14 August 2010

Bonfire of the Quangos

Whenever we need to get a prescription re-ordered from the Doctor's surgery, I send them an e-mail: it's quick, free, convenient and - until recently - reliable. However, the chemist had apparently been told there wasn't anything ready last time they went to collect it, and the receptionists have been claiming not to have received the order. So since it was the third time this has happened, I decided I'd had enough. I don't know how reliable or otherwise the NHS mail servers are, but on the assumption that it may be an IT problem rather than any particular fault of the surgery's, I contacted NHS Coventry - the body responsible for running NHS services locally, and soon-to-be-abolished under the government's new Quango-purging initiative.

This morning I got the paperwork telling me how they're going about *hopefully* getting something done about the problem. There was also a two-page 'anti-discrimination' questionnaire. Normally I just bin these pieces of nosey politically-correct nonsense, but this particular one took the biscuit. As well as asking for my postcode (which was on the envelope they'd sent it in) and my sex (which they could have had a shot at deducing from the "Mr" it was addressed to), it asked whether I was - amongst other things - bisexual, agnostic or gender-reassigned. Huh?? What the hell has that got to do with why my e-mails are going missing? Any questions, it said, could be directed to the "Head of Equality and Human Rights". With a title like that, he or she has got to be earning more in a day than I get in a week. Whatever.... I bet they'll make a superb 'guy' with which to crown this particular Quango bonfire!

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