Hooray! Another new rule for we patient patients

Thank heavens that the NHS’s fat wallet is to be filled even more because the NHS Ideas Department has been hard at work creating some new vital security rules.

Want that prescription your GP has left for you? There’s a new procedure for collecting it. Up till now, proclaiming your postcode, street address and then birth date in full has worked the magic.

Now – so I am reliably informed today – we must present photographic evidence to show that we are who we say we are when we approach the gals at the GP practice reception desk.

It's as well that I am letting you in on this strict new rule because you won’t find it online.

Keeping it secret

At least, I couldn’t find it so I think we can take it that the NHS Ideas Department has realised the importance of keeping this new one secret from the Enemy.

You’re – we’re – not at liberty to ask why we must now produce a family photo album, or recent passport, or driving licence. Obviously, the NHS Ideas Department, helped by a big new NHS increase in funds, knows best. Perhaps it’s sufficient for us to image that the department has twigged a coming terrorist ploy to snatch prescriptions.

Of course, given the number of prescriptions issued each day, that might well zap a goodly proportion of the population without once having to light a fuse, nor don a suicide vest.

It’s probably a new more subtle form of terrorism we have still to learn about. Or, I should say, would have been something we had to learn about had our good people at NHS Ideas Department not got wind of it.

Like a West End chorus

I think I might have mentioned standing in a massive queue at a hospital not long ago, and one by one, rather like a West End chorus, we were ordered by a sergeant-major of a nurse to announce our addresses, then date of our birth.

All the way along the line, like schoolkids preparing for the end-of-year concert, each proclaimed their day, month, year, and then address details, one after another.

Now it seems such encouraging scenes are to be enjoyed at the GP’s, too, only with the chorus stretched. The revised routine will be postcode, house number and street, birthdate in full – day, month, year – and then perhaps with a theatrical flourish a recognisable portrait of the recipient.

I gather it will be perfectly acceptable if the snap show hints of the holiday venue - Benidorm or Basildon, South End or Salcombe - as long as it was taken in the last five years.

Oh, picking up a prescription when it’s not for you?

Tut tut. I suspect you might as well give up before you try …. Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com