NHS E-Mail Reply Three Years Late

The National Health Service has apologised after writing to a man to address various concerns over his hospital medical treatment - three-and-half years after he kicked the bucket and went aloft to join the Choir Invisible.

Morton Fuctifino’s daughter e-mailed both the National Patient Safety Agency and the NHS following the death of her 96-year-old father at Smegmadale’s prestigious Veterinarian’s Trust Hospital.

Candida Fuctifino told a reporter from Pox News that when she received a response – three and a half years later – it stated in true numpty bureaucratic fashion : "Dear Morton, hope you’re feeling better by now and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused by our lack of trained staff and inadequate stocks of your favourite medications but hope you realise there’s a recession going on so just sit tight and whistle if the pain gets too much.”

“We have some new refugee doctors and nurses arriving from Ethiopia and Somalia in the next couple of weeks so our health service should be back up to its usual 60% standard of efficiency once they sneak past the Borders Agency immigration people and report for duty.

Mr Fuctifino, who had a terminal verruca and strangulated haemorrhoids , was not given his prescribed pain-relieving narcotic rhubarb medication in the last two days of his life which caused severe anxiety attacks and prompted him to bite his own fingers off.

Family members claim they found him lying in a pool of his own blood resulting from the haemorrhaging of the severed digits – with other ward patients crawling around the floor licking up the sanguine treat as they hadn’t been fed since the previous day due catering staff shortages and the Muslim cooks being on a go-slow following a wage dispute over their pay rate increase for frying bacon and pork sausages.

Morton, a former wheelbarrow mechanic, was treated – in mortal absentia - to a second round of bureaucratic incompetence when his family received a bouquet of marigolds and a bunch of black grapes addressed to him personally from Sir Sefton Gormless, the New Labour Minister for Apologies, with the attached card stating “Best regards, Morton – get well soon.”

Ms. Candida Muffrot, a senior spokeswoman for the National Health Service, told a reporter from the Abattoir Gazette that "The NHS is aware that a minor error was made when responding to an e-mail enquiry from the relative of a deceased patient.”
"As soon as this was identified, we contacted the dead person involved and apologised for any distress caused.”

“We have since reviewed our patient / family contact systems to ensure this type of mistake doesn’t occur again and have now introduced a new classification scheme on our pc database whereby patients who are still in hospital and alive will be coded with a capital A - and patients lying in bed who have gone totally stone cold will henceforth be moved down to the mortuary level as soon as someone notices they’re no longer breathing - and coded with a capital D - for Dead.”

And Ms. Fuctifino’s final comment on her opinion of the NHS? - “I’ve seen better organised riots.”