Not only to people in government backed health care systems get to wait months upon months for surgeries, but doctors in the system also get to spend years handling legal paperwork from lawsuits filed by men angry that they can’t get their non-existent body parts examined.

A family doctor has been summoned to a formal hearing over his refusal to put a 34-year-old male patient on the list for screening for cervical cancer.

The complaint has caused doctors in the west country practice to spend hours in meetings and writing replies to the local primary care trust over the complaint which began two years ago.

The man, who has fathered a child, believes he is a hermaphrodite although his doctors have examined him and can find no evidence for this. However, they did agree to his request to be re-registered with a female name.

One doctor in the practice said: “We are worried that the PCT is so falling over backwards to be patient-friendly, that it has gone too far the other way. Silly things are starting to happen.”

The wife of one of the GPs, told The Telegraph she had every sympathy for people who believe they had the body of the wrong gender but the decision to investigate the refusal was political correctness taken to extremes.

She said her husband, who has been a GP for 30 years and who trains young doctors would be “pleased to hear from anyone, medical or otherwise, who could teach him the correct way to carry out a cervical smear on a 34-year-old male”.

She added: “The refusal of one of the doctors to put Mr X on the recall list for cervical screening has resulted in a complaint and, as a result the doctor, practice manager and other practitioners have spent many hours, at the expense of the care of other patients, answering written inquiries.

“My suggestion would be to accede unquestioningly to the patient’s demand and carry out the procedure requested. Provided of course that a representative of the primary care trust could indicate the necessary part of this gentleman’s anatomy, and was able to give the learned medics a clue as to how they could access it.”

You gotta love the response from the bureaucrats:

A local primary care trust spokesman said: “We have received a complaint as you described and as required, under the NHS complaints procedure, we are investigating along with other complaints from the individual.”

Right.  Because a complaint from a man who wants his non-existent vagina examined requires two years of investigation on the taxpayer dime.

But this is what you get when you put the government in charge of health care.  It still baffles me that anyone would want a system like that here.