IT – it stands for Information Technology you know?  For me IT also stands for I and then also Temper.  This is because I lose my Temper quite a lot with IT.

The clinical system is fab – when it works.  An example of how my temper tantrum boils up like a teenager who has been told to put their phone away for 30 seconds happens because of events like this.

By 11am this morning I had spoken to twelve, different, very pleasant  men from either the clinical systems IT department or from our own primary care IT department.  It was decided about two years ago that practice managers and certainly not GPs or any other surgery staff could be trusted any longer to install any software, not even a printer.  At first I thought this is great!  I can’t be responsible for fixing everybody’s IT problems in the building from now on.  I won’t come back from a two week holiday to someone not asking me how my holiday was, instead within seconds dragging me to stare at their Brother printer and pointing at it a lot.

Hooray! I would no longer have to deal with IT issues.  How wrong I was.

Every single time.  Every single crash, every single time a printer breaks or an email doesn’t send or the figures aren’t right, every time I have to log it with the IT team   Then they might log it with the clinical system team and then the IT department within  the clinical system tell the primary care IT team that it’s not their fault it’s the IT team fault so then the IT team ring me back and ask me, eventually, what the problem is.

I then get a long reference number and I also get a row if I dare to mention two problems in the same email.  I also get told my case is closed because my emails are too long.  On one morning alone I had a slow system, a crashing system, a system that wouldn’t print out fit notes, I had systems with no software, a spirometer that no longer worked properly, an ECG machine that didn’t print out correctly, a GP that attended the wrong meeting because when I emailed him to say the venue changed he didn’t get that email for 24hrs.

I also get GPs, quite a lot, telling me they may throw the said computers through the window one day and go back to what used to work quite well for them – paper and pens.   So – to help you with your IT problems, follow this flow chart and all will be well.