Robert Fisk has a surprising way of spending his time (Image: Daily Express)
Do you ever get the feeling that a customer service person is hoping you’ll die so they don’t have to answer your enquiry? That, as the recorded message says “your call is important to us” and the hold music plays a version of Greensleeves, there is someone in a call centre who wishes for your demise so they don’t have to pretend to care about you wanting to end your broadband contract? I get that feeling about one email I sent to complain about issues with a service I receive. That service is the National Health Service, and I sent the email to the complaints team at the hospital where I go for treatment for my incurable bowel cancer.
And every day that goes by without a reply makes me think that they really are waiting for me to die so they can announce “case closed”. You might think that I’m being overly dramatic, but incurable cancer isn’t called that for fun. Statistics suggest that only 11% of people with my cancer live longer than five years after diagnosis.
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I was diagnosed in June 2023, so I’m past the halfway mark and should expect to be dead by June 2028. But when I sent my email to my cancer hospital’s complaints team, aka the Patient Advice and Liaison Service, aka PALS, I had only been fighting the disease for 18 months.
I sent my email to them on December 11, 2024, and received nothing back, not even an acknowledgement that my email had been received and that they would look into it.
Back in May last year, I emailed to chase up my complaints and said I wanted to submit two more, but was wondering if it would be better to go straight to the ombudsman. I heard nothing back.
This year, following another incident I wanted to report, I tried again to get a response and copied in the hospital trust’s chief executive and one of the medical directors. This time, I got a response from the chief executive’s executive assistant saying that the complaints team has been asked to follow up with me.
That was more than a month ago, and I’ve heard nothing further. You might wonder why I bother to complain when I should just be enjoying the last two years of my life.
My goal before I die is to improve the lives of as many people as possible. It’s effectively my one-sentence bucket list before I kick the bucket.
And so by raising issues with treatment at my so-called “world-leading cancer hospital”, I’m hopefully giving the staff a chance to fix them so people who get treated now and years into the future have a better experience than I have.
But this cannot happen if the complaints team does nothing. They need to investigate issues so changes can be made and problems can be rectified. Could you imagine if a response didn’t come through until the day I die?
I apologise now, but everyone who goes to my funeral will have to listen to the response because I’ll ensure someone reads it out instead of a passage from the Bible or a eulogy.
Hopefully, by then, the hospital will realise that instead of being aware of the importance of doing something like I’ve been told in the past, they actually have to do something.
