If you go to the NSW Government Health website and click on “Contact Us,” this is part of what comes up:-
To us, this is unbelievably annoying.
“Street address” – who cares about their street address?
“Postal address” – the same. Who’s going to to be wanting to send them any “snail mails” these days?
“Telephone” – these numbers MAY be useful in cases of extreme emergency, perhaps in 1 case in a 1000. Even then, in our experience advice received by telephone can’t really be relied on, and because you haven’t got anything in writing, there’s seldom anything you can do about it.
“Fax” – faxes were out of date 15 years ago!
Nothing about what’s really needed – an ordinary email address. Not even one of those horrible email forms!
And that’s just the beginning of the problems.
If you want help with, say, a drug problem, you are expected to go to their website and conduct your own search as to what may be on it on drug problems, let alone what’s on any other website. (We’ve just been to their website and used their search facility to search “drug,” and guess how many results came up? – five thousand, three hundred and ten!!!)
And when we eventually found this, it appears that the information that’s provided is original material produced by NSW Government Health employees. It would appear to us that the chances of material produced by the government of little old New South Wales being the best available in the whole wide world would be less that 1 in 100. In other words, the chances are 99 out of a 100 that there is better information elsewhere on the world wide web, readily available.
(Note: Nothing here on the drug “Ice.” A Western Australia Premier has been quoted as saying that Ice is WA’s number one problem. Yet when we emailed a minister in his government asking if it was envisaged that a website would ever be set up to help people dealing with it, our email wasn’t even acknowledged – so typical!)
What’s needed is an ordinary email address that can be used to ask questions about health and welfare, which result in us getting replies back along these lines – “Here is a link to what we consider to be the best information in relation to your question in the whole wide world,” provided by dedicated people who spend their time researching and researching what’s on the world wide web, and answering questions.
Use mail@medicalquestionsandanswers.net to send us any questions.