Successfully Adulted

[davidgillon]

I have, after 9 months, managed to send off a request to Wheelchair Services saying assess me, dammit!

It took so long my GP, who told me to send it, retired between the first draft of the letter and the final one. Fortunately the new one agreed too.

Now I just have to wait and see if they turn me down flat like they did the first two times. Though I think 'your wheelchair* is so utterly inappropriate it's making my disability worse' probably ensures they'll have to do something.

*Yes, they refused me an assessment, but dumped the cheapest of cheap wheelchairs on my doorstep.
 

Comments

[lilysea]

Woo hoo! ^_^ \o/

Yay! ^_^

Go you! ^_^ \o/

[davidgillon]

<3

[kaberett]

WELL DONE. Luck.

[davidgillon]

<3

[untonuggan]

♥

good luck.

[davidgillon]

I just had Wheelchair Services on the phone to say "We will be calling you in for a review".

But they also said "Though we'll need all the medical stuff to be backed by your medical people, so you'll need to bring that along." Which wouldn't be unreasonable but for my old GP having just retired, neither of the two new GPs having really discussed my disability issues with me, and the fact I just got confirmation there's a howling error in my records that potentially means my disability isn't in there at all.

[jesse_the_k]

Shit shit shit.

I'd assumed that the NHS had long ago standardized medical records and transferred them all to One Big Computer in Woking.

You will triumph in the end.

[davidgillon]

Ah, you haven't heard of the Care.Data fiasco! Head of NHS IT was an ex-journalist who had formed the Dr Foster medical informatics company, then been bought out by the NHS. He came up with the bright idea of centralizing all the NHS medical records currently held in GPs surgeries, and selling them to big pharma. He was on record as saying people should not be allowed to opt out.

The privacy lobby went ballistic, pointing out that it was actually trivially simple to break the level of anonymization he was proposing.

Questions were asked in the House, ministers were crucified in committee. It came out the NHS were already doing this with hospital records, and had never turned down a request, not even when the people asking were insurance companies (to add insult to injury, they were only charging cost, they didn't even make any money on it). Government tried to defend it and the examples kept on getting worse. They decided they were going to defer implementation and run a pilot. That pilot should have started 6 months ago...

As for the guy in charge, he hopped the fence again and is now setting up Telstra's UK medical informatics arm.

Getting back to me, they actually should have some of this already (probably not in any great detail), because the original request they turned down in September 2014 was filled in by my GP.

[jesse_the_k]

ZOMG this is amazing (and horrifying). If you put this in a novel the editors would elide saying it's too unbelievable.

Also, Dr Foster is a large national vet supplier headquartered in the northern town I visit each summer, so that was a hoot.

I'm glad you won't have to start from the ground floor.