In the wake of further criticism on delays to ordinary mail Royal Mail announced in April a new solution for the more important letters from the National Health Service.
The solution design provides an option for NHS providers to add a unique NHS identifier into the Mailmark barcode. Where our internal reporting shows that we are not meeting expected quality of service standards regularly, at either a local or a national level, the new NHS barcode will allow us to identify NHS mail and automate its extraction from Royal Mail sorting machines. Thereafter we will discretely handle the mail through to delivery. This will ensure NHS providers get the service they require, and patients receive their letters in a timely manner.
Customers choosing to use the NHS class identifier will need to add it to the class field in the Mailmark barcode and eManifest. This is not a new or separate service. Instead, the NHS barcode would be eligible to be printed on NHS letters using Access Priority (D+2) or Standard (D+3) Mailmark Business Mail services. The option is suitable for patient communications including appointment letters and test results.
I haven't seen any such letters yet, or had any reported, but it is now apparent that these will be handled in the same way as Special Delivery mail, according to this graphic from the Royal Mail website.
Note the original meaning of discreet - "Discrete means separate or divided. A discrete unit is a separate part of something larger."
I received one a couple of weeks ago on an appointment letter from London's Royal Free Hospital. I put it aside for you but can no longer find it...
ReplyDeleteThese changes by Royal Mail will probably improve matters. However the main cause of tardiness in patients' letters arriving from clinics is delays caused by the arcane NHS method of sending them. It has a fixation on boundaries between 'departments' so if a specialist clinic is in a different hospital from the one which 'owns' it you can print the appointment (or other letters) out but then they await a courier to take them - after the clinic closes - to the main base. So they are franked a day later than necessary and they go 2nd class at the end of the second day. Sometimes; though; urgent appointment letters are accidentally dropped into the out-tray of a different clinic based at the actual site by clumsy staff...
DeleteWe get more than our share ( it's our age ) but disappointingly only DSA, PPI or meter so far.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree that it should be "discrete", as written it does conjure up an amusing image of the sorter hiding in a corner, sorting the items so that noone else knows what he's doing!
ReplyDeleteIf this is to become commonplace for letters sent by the NHS then processing them alongside Special Delivery will mean a considerable increase in the time spent on them, and not only in the SD Locker / Cage. There's no suggestion that the NHS will be charged more, additional staff being employed is most unlikely and so we can surely expect less time for ordinary First and Second Class letters which will suffer greater delays and miss delivery targets even more significantly.
ReplyDeleteIt won't be "commonplace for letters sent by the NHS"; I had one last month for an appointment about 10 days after it arrived and it was a normal letter. Mind you as I was on holiday at the time a SMS text message would have been better!
DeleteI get them for vaccination suggestions and all GP appointments, but not for the hospital x-ray unit!
Thanks Ian, so quite a rarity then, hence you not getting deluged with replies to "Has anyone seen one yet ?"
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