I really am starting to despair about the National Health Service and how difficult it now seems to access it. There seems to have been a massive and very rapid shift over to digital access to services and it now seems just so difficult to get to speak to, let alone see, a doctor.

I find the whole experience very off-putting as the whole thing seems to have now been designed to prevent people accessing services rather than helping them to access services. We are both (currently) reasonably au-fait with the use of technology for many of the things we now access and generally things run smoothly where they have been designed for digital access from the ground up. The NHS is different, it just seems to have had technology forced upon it and things just seem to be bolted on without real consideration for the users of the service.

If we consider my sister who has a learning disability as well as many other problems. It is impossible for her to use even telephone services and she will simply put the telephone down if she is faced with a system where she has to choose between various options. If the option exists, which it doesn't always, to wait to speak to someone she will give up if nothing happens, even if she can hear properly. Faced with a twenty minute wait for someone to speak to her my sister will simply give up and there are many thousands like her.

It seems to be forgotten that there are many people who cannot and do not want to deal with largely mechanised and digitised service provision. There are still many who cannot use and access online services and these people are becoming the forgotten members of society when it comes to accessing today's health services.

I think far more thought, care and planning needs to be given to the introduction of automated and online access to health and social care services. The needs of the struggling and the vulnerable need to be at the front of the minds of the systems designers. If the vulnerable groups can use services and access them conveniently then the able will have no problem, the reverse is not true.