I quite often mock, criticise and condemn Britain’s failed National Health Service system. I’ve mostly done this on behalf of others who have suffered from the piss poor treatment, outrageously politicised and sclerotic management and shabby experiences that many get from the NHS.

However yesterday it was my turn to experience just how shit the NHS and its employees can be.

I attended a nurse practitioner’s appointment that I made in order to have an age and weight related diabetes test. No real botherable symptoms of this disease but I thought it might be a good idea to get a check.

I turned up for my appointment at the agreed time and was to my amazement called into see the nurse early. ‘This is good I thought not having to wait’. Unfortunately my good feelings about the situation quickly evaporated when I started talking to the nurse. To say that this woman had a bad attitude would be an understatement too far. She had all the customer service ability of a shop assistant in a Soviet bread shop, after the bread had run out.

She asked all manner of unnecessary questions about lifestyle that I felt were not appropriate for an appointment for what should have been a basic blood draw. This is the sort of stuff that should be discussed with the doctor in my view, not a nurse whose job it is this day to just take blood.

However the key thing that pissed me off about this encounter is that she refused to listen to me with regards to my medical history and in particular issues I’ve had regarding blood taking. I told her that I’ve had problems with veins retreating in the past along with needlephobia and that I’ve often had to have several different bits of my body poked to find a vein. The nurse unfortunately did not listen and even loudly challenged me when I said that I’d had to have a femoral stab many years ago in order to get a sample. The nurse said ‘that’s impossible, if you were given a femoral stab you would have been unconscious’. I was pissed off with her declaring that a part of my medical history was untrue as I was clearly recall being awake for it as I remember volunteering for it when a nurse and a doctor couldn’t find a decent vein to get blood from via arm or hand and offered this option as a last resort.

When I’ve had blood taken before I’ve always been asked questions about which is my dominant arm or have you had issues with blood taking along with where has blood been taken successfully in the past. I’ve also had blood taken by nurses who are either ruthlessly efficient or extremely good at the sort of explanations that calm. The nurse who I saw yesterday was nothing like that. This nurse nursed by the tick box. There was only one place that she took blood from and that’s the crook of the right arm because that’s what she’d always done. Unfortunately that’s not always been the easiest place to get my blood from and her digging around made my lower arm twitch. She had another go, same result. I expected her to do what other nurses have done and try to find another more appropriate place. But that’s not what happened. She refused to try again elsewhere in case she got a needlestick injury. She said to me ‘well that’s your lot’. There was no attempt to do the job properly and try to get the blood from somewhere more suitable. Maybe if she’d actually listened to the medical history that I was giving her regarding blood sampling then this might have been a successful blood sampling visit.

This nurse was rude and arrogant and clearly unable to unwilling to listen to her patients. I got the distinct impression that this individual would have been far happier at work if the pesky patients didn’t keep getting in the way. This particular NHS employee was woefully unprofessional even when compared to other NHS staff who’ve carried out similar procedures for me in the past. It should be basic manners and professionalism to listen to a patient speaking about previous experiences with blood tests and that’s not what I got from this nurse. What I got was confirmation that the NHS is run with all the concern for the customer that many of the former nationalised industries had, which is not much at all.

The outcome of this botched bloodletting was that now I’ve got to have another appointment with a specialist blood taker at the same GP surgery. This means that there is now going to be two appointments for this issue rather than the one that might had been the case if yesterday’s nurse had listened a bit more about previous problems with blood taking. There didn’t need to be the waste of two appointments for this issue but there was, because one NHS employee couldn’t be arsed to do the job properly or to her customer’s satisfaction.

This nurse would not have lasted five minutes in the private sector and definitely not in retail where the customer notices bad service and can often shop elsewhere. It’s only in the NHS and other parts of the public sector where people who should never have to be exposed to customers get to be the customer facing part.

Some may say that my inconveniences are on the minor end of the scale when it comes to NHS incompetence and of course they would be correct in saying that. The problem is that inconveniences like this are not a one off or a rarely occurring event. They are common. Too many patients or as I prefer to say customers of the NHS have to deal with incompetent, rude, unprofessional, ignorant and arrogant NHS staff. At any hour of the day, someone somewhere is getting the sort of sub-par treatment that I got and maybe even worse from the NHS and that is what is important. A service that is supposed to serve the British people should be able to give a much better product in terms of appropriate treatment and staff attitude than it does at present.