Breaking news from the DRSEQA website...

“The EQA System will be unavailable until Monday Feb 1st. Please DO NOT attempt to og on before this time - your details will not be recognised”

Hmmm... methinks they have a few quality assurance issues of their own there. Not least in their ability to spell ‘log’. I wonder if their website would pass an EQA visit..?

And talking of quality assurance, I thought I'd failed a visit myself this afternoon, when I discovered to my horror that I’d kept a 93-year-old lady waiting for an hour and a half. One sniff of a no-win-no-fee lawyer and I’d have been sued to high heaven for mental cruelty. But I swear it wasn’t my fault, your honour.

We’d actually received a phone call from the lady’s surgery first thing that morning to say that they’d been unable to arrange hospital transport for her that day, and she’d therefore be unable to make it. So the office cancelled her appointment and made her a new one for March. The surgery said they’d let her know.

Well, not only did they not let her know, but they managed to organise transport for her after all. And they didn’t bother to tell us that either. So shortly before 2pm, the hospital transport guys picked her up, brought her over, dumped her in the communal waiting room, and left without saying a word. Having been told she wasn’t coming, I naturally didn’t bother calling her by name, but as luck would have it, I did go out and make a general call for anyone waiting for retinopathy screening.

Unfortunately she was as deaf as a post and didn’t hear me. It wasn’t until 3:30pm when she managed to wave at a nurse that we finally realised she was there. The irony is, she didn’t complain at all. In fact she kept apologising to me for being a nuisance. I suppose when you’ve lived through two world wars and are three months short of your 94th birthday, a ninety-minute wait for retinopathy screening is nothing.