Its really as bad as they warned you.

Have you ever been warned that a situation or place is really bad, and you think to yourself, "Oh, it can't be THAT bad", only to find out that it was possibly worse than you could have imagined? This has happened to me already: when we were thinking of moving to Connecticut and a cousin of mine told me that teaching jobs were hard to come by there, and I thought....see above....only to find out that I couldn't get a teaching job there unless I got a masters degree for love or money and spent five fruitless years trying. One job interview I went on had four hundred applicants! So, you'd think I'd have learned my lesson when several people warned me about how bad the NHS was, especially if you have a child who needs help with an educational disability like speech and language.

But no, I thought the same way, and I have now been exposed to the absolute mess that is the NHS in England, and it does not seem to be improving at any time in the near future.

If you have seen my previous posts, you know that I have already spent two months trying to get my Older Son's speech and language report from Shrewsbury to Kingston to start the ball rolling to get him some speech therapy here. After I finally sent them my copy of this report, I called them last Friday to hear the same woman who cheerfully told me that someone had shredded his report accidentally tell me that now she had read this report she saw that Older Son was going to Reception, England's version of Kindergarten, this Fall, at a school in the Sutton district, which meant that I now had to contact the Sutton clinic to get Older Son help.

The fact that if this woman had asked a few simple questions about my son two months ago I would not have been wasting my time for two months trying to get a useless report to her did not seem to cross her mind. It did mine, several times. However, I remained civil and got the phone number of the clinic in Sutton from her. It didn't work. I had to find the correct one off the internet.

So I called the folks at the clinic in Sutton on Monday. The woman in charge there proceeded to tell me that for Older Son to get any help from them, they would have to get a referral from my GP. When I told her the name of my GP, she told me that they would not accept a referral from that GP, because that GP was a Kingston GP. I would now have to change from a Kingston GP that I can walk to in ten minutes to a Sutton GP that I have to take at least one bus to in Sutton to get my son help.

She also told me that I would have to switch my family to a Sutton GP and have an initial appointment with this GP to get a referral BEFORE Older Son turns five in October, because apparently children with speech difficulties turn into children who do not need speech therapy after they turn five in England according to the NHS, and I would then have to take the school route to get Older Son help.

The school route, I have been informed, is even more treacherous and convoluted and jerrymandering than the NHS route. I have learned my lesson. I DO believe that it is that bad.

Thursday I finally managed to call all of the GPs in the Sutton area that were within a two mile radius of us. They all told me that they won't accept us because we are too far away from them, not in their cachement area.

For those of you keeping notes: we live in Worcester Park, Surrey, in the Borough of Sutton, right next to the town of Kingston. Because we live on the border of Worcester Park near Kingston, we are signed up at a GP that is affiliated with the Borough of Kingston and Kingston Hospital.  Older Son was not able to sign up to the school that is closest to us, a Kingston school, because they didn't have any room, so we signed him up at a school about a fifteen minute walk away that did have room. This school is in the Borough of Sutton. Because Older Son is going to a school in Sutton, he now needs to go to a speech therapy clinic in Sutton. The Sutton clinic won't accept a referral from a Kingston GP. The Sutton GPs wont accept us in their practice because we live in a Kingston cachement area for the NHS, even though we pay our council tax to Sutton.  Its so easy to fall into sarcasm at this point. I have just deleted a rant.

So I called back our original GP yesterday, who havent even got us on their books yet because they're changing over their computer systems, and they said they HAVE done referrals to Sutton practices before. So tomorrow I need to call up this woman at the Sutton clinic and convince her, or her boss, or her bosses boss, or the Queen if I have to, that Older Son WILL get speech therapy from her clinic.....when he gets to the front of the queue, which will be in about three months. ‎

......and that concludes my rant for today.....