Jeremy Hunt’s NHS Mandate will make the service even more cumbersome

Earlier this week my wife called to make a GP appointment for our daughter, who has been experiencing some worrying tummy pains.  Middle of next week she was told, earliest. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t call at 8 o’clock,’ the receptionist chided. ‘We had several slots then, but now they’ve all gone.’ Silly us for prioritising getting the children to school at that time of the morning.

I expect that Jeremy Hunt would say that it is precisely this kind of thing – not a scandal, not a crisis, but just one of a million similar tiny rebuffs people experience at the hands of the NHS every week – that has led him to demand that everybody should be able to book their doctors’ appointments online by 2015. A quick glance at the internet will tell you that this is not the first time the promise has been made, but it has been promised again as part of the new