by Henry VIII attempts to book a GP appointment and learns that eight in the morning is a competitive sport
I had physicians standing outside my chamber at all hours, prepared to attend me the moment I so much as coughed. My current surgery opens its phone lines at eight and is fully booked by four minutes past.
The Eight O’Clock Rush
I was warned by a fellow patient in the waiting room that booking a same day appointment required calling at exactly eight, not one minute before, not one minute after, and redialling continuously through the engaged tone until, by luck alone, a line opened. I once organised naval assaults with less precise timing. I dialled at seven fifty nine and fifty eight seconds and still heard only the engaged tone, forty consecutive times, a sound I now associate with genuine despair.
The App
Dev suggested I try the NHS application instead, which allowed me to request an appointment digitally, order repeat prescriptions, and view my own medical record, an amount of personal access I never once permitted my own physicians, who guessed at my ailments largely through vibes and the colour of my urine. The app worked beautifully, immediately, and told me the earliest available appointment was in eleven days, an outcome identical to the phone method but achieved with considerably less shouting.
The Triage Call
Eventually a receptionist called me back for a triage assessment, asking me to describe my symptoms to her directly so a doctor could decide whether I truly needed to be seen. I explained I had survived jousting injuries, gout, a leg wound that never properly healed for the last decade of my original life, and the general accumulated damage of six wives, and she said that sounded manageable and offered me a telephone consultation for Thursday.
The Consultation
The doctor called precisely on time, a level of punctuality I have not witnessed in this country since arriving, and diagnosed my complaint within four minutes, prescribing medication that was ready at the pharmacy before I had even left my flat. I stood in genuine awe. Four minutes. I once waited four months for a single letter from Rome regarding an annulment, and this doctor solved an actual physical ailment in less time than it takes to boil an egg.
The Verdict
I have concluded that the NHS, whatever its flaws, whatever its eight o’clock phone scrum, still moves with more genuine competence than most of the institutions I personally ran. I built an entire church specifically to get my own way faster. This system got me antibiotics in a single afternoon without me threatening anybody once. Progress, it turns out, looks like a very calm doctor and a very short phone call.
The Follow Up
A week later the surgery texted asking how I was getting on, a small kindness that struck me as more attentive than most correspondence I received from my own physicians across thirty eight years of actual reign. I replied that I was recovering well, and received, within the hour, an automated message thanking me for my feedback. I have decided that whatever else troubles this health service, it remembers to ask, and in my experience, very few institutions ever bother.
My relationship with physicians goes back rather further than this surgery knows, as covered in the jousting accident. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the NHS warning it may collapse entirely, Burnham’s promised historic reform of social care, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
