‘The doctor spent most of the time looking at the screen of his computer’

• I DID an unusual thing this week.

I saw a consultant physician at an NHS teaching hospital. And despite the government telling me I’d have to wait years for this I have only waited weeks.

I was disappointed, though, when the doctor spent most of the time looking at the screen of his computer and writing on it using one finger of each hand. I had hoped he’d be listening to, looking at, me. After a while he did do this and then he went back to the computer.

So at the end of the consultation I asked him what proportion of our time had he been doing clinical work and how much had been “managerial”. At least three-quarters had been managerial he told me.

I asked him to explain. Most of the typing he’d done had been to answer questions that management wanted to know. It wasn’t about the clinical state of the patient. This seemed a nonsense to me.

As a country we’re dangerously short of consultant time, it costs huge sums to train consultants and “hospital management” wastes this valuable resource having it do secretarial work on two fingers.

If only a trained medical consultant can do this work, which I wonder, why can’t the doctor record the answers and have a clerk type it up? For reasons which you’ll understand I have cannot reveal the name of the doctor.

NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED