The doctor should email you now

A month ago, I had my annual check-up after my op a year ago at 'Fastrack' Hospital. I am part of a 'copying letters to patients' initiative, a scheme I greatly value. It makes me feel that I am a conscious active part of my treatment. And it gives me some reassurance that the quacks are not pulling wool over my eyes. Only one thing worried me about these letters. They usually took as long as two weeks to arrive, although they were always dated the day after my treatment or out-patient appointment. They came by snail-mail, of course, like most correspondence between doctor and patient in the email-free NHS. But I can't blame strike-prone Royal Mail for the delay, as the letters come by TNT. I suppose the delay is because the letters would probably have been shipped out to Hyderabad or the Philippines for transcription. I could live with a two-week delay, because the clinicians have learnt to explain themselves to me in words of one syllable, or undergo a rigorous cross-examination. And my wife writes down everything the doctor says ( see 'The Patient's better half' ) So the letter has not usually added much to my understanding of my condition. It was just nice to receive it. But this time the letter arrived four weeks and one day after my appointment. That is not acceptable. I don't blame the doctor, but the system. I suspect the transcription process. Why can't doctors learn to use voice recognition systems, and produce the letter (or preferably email) on the spot? The technology has been around for decades. The doctors only need the will to get through an uncomfortable, but hopefully brief, learning curve. And then the patient and GP would get the out-patient report in days not weeks. It would of course lighten the doctor's transcription task if he didn't have to produce a beautifully-printed letter with the hospital's crest and logo, but instead a simple email. And the hospital would not have to print several hard copies to distribute. My letters go to three other people as well as the GP and myself. And a consultant I see in 'H' hospital, my regular hospital, tells me that whenever he refers a patient to 'Fastrack' they send him hard copies of reports on that patient in perpetuity, which he finds marginally useful, but clogs up his filing system, and is a shocking waste of money. Email would cut out all this paper – and millions of pounds off NHS costs – at a stroke. I should have mentioned this to Alastair Darling. What do doctors have against email? Other professions have accepted it. Even MPs, who are perceived generally to be even more luddite than doctors, now carry out 60% of their correspondence with their constituents by email. One techie MP, Derek Wyatt, told me that in January this year, he sent 150 emails but only two formal letters to his constituents. Yet an MP's correspondence is only marginally less confidential than a clinician's. "Ah, but," I hear the doctors say, "a lot of our patients are old and computer-illiterate, and couldn't handle emails." I think they overstate these numbers. The doctors should talk to Martha Lane Fox, Gordon Brown's inclusivity czarina. She will tell them what the numbers really are, and will tell them what she is doing to reduce the digital divide. She would probably also tell them that a switch by the NHS to email would give a colossal boost to her efforts to get the old to embrace the internet. Everybody would win.