On 20/08/2018 14:01, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
Had an interesting one from my local large hospital. Seems their central
booking system can't record a patient's email address. And of course that
could be very useful to send confirmation or instuctions etc quickly. But
can record a mobile phone number.

Didn't ask for anything to be sent by email. 'They' asked me if I had one.
And again for a subsequent appointment.



Sometimes I think the designers of these systems don't live in the real
world, or think everyone uses equipment the same way as they do.

I have a yearly medical checkup and the appointment is automatically
generated and sent by snail mail with an instruction that if it is
inconvenient to let them know as soon as possible by a phone call. Do
nothing if the appointment is OK.

A few days after getting the letter I started to get phone calls to my
land line. I always let the answerphone pick up by way of call
monitoring. While the outgoing message is in progress the NHS automated
robot sends out the message with the result that during this time it is
not heard. I only caught the very end of the message "..... appointment.
Don't respond to this call, we will call you later" My machine doesn't
record messages of a few seconds.

If I hadn't been in the next time the robot phoned and if I hadn't
identified the number and picked up immediately I wouldn't have any
knowledge of the calls at all[1]. The NHS robot just wanted a "press 1
to confirm you will be attending" etc.

[1] I would have a record of the number and how many times it called but
not recognising the number would have no idea what it was about nor any
inclination to find out.

--
mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk