If you want to know why looking after the consumer is crucial to any business, take a trip down to the local hospital and see what happens when you don't

During a week from hell, I have been reminded that you can learn a lot when, by accident or design, you experience another organisation as a customer, uncovering dry rot at every turn. Why pay management consultants to shine a light on your own set-up when it's free to learn from the ineptitude of others?

As the week began, an infected thumb necessitated several left-handed calls to my local health centre, to justify an audience with a doctor. Only deigning to see me after I'd made clear I could no longer work my Blackberry, they kept me waiting more than 30 minutes, well beyond the dispensary closing time, which led to a few choice words of dissatisfaction between myself, the receptionist and the doctor. "We're doing our best and doing you a favour, and it's a free service so you should be more grateful," came the reply.

I was in too much pain to remind this public servant that it is far from free, our taxes having more than doubled in 10 years, that my family had paid for her professional training, and that an expensive public service should at least try to treat its patients as valued consumers.

The NHS offers a high-profile example of what happens when you mistake the consumer for Oliver Twist. Sadly, like Mr Bumble, they are in a position to only care at the point of service if they feel like it, with the effect that the system operates in the image of a soup kitchen. Meanwhile, any competitive business or charity has to care obsessively about improving the value offered to the customer at every turn in his or her journey. The best ones ratchet up improvements, season in, season out, and their results show it.

My impressions of the NHS were further reinforced when, later in the week, while I was away from home, my wife was reduced to tears and forced to beg repeatedly for a doctor to visit while she was bedridden in acute pain. When he arrived, the doctor was Hippocrates personified, but the fact that this expensive prepaid service is allowed to get away with forcing vulnerable consumers to beg to get the help for which they have already paid handsomely seems a clear abuse of market position.

Trading Standards would be all over any private-sector charlatans who operated in a similar vein. It is an object lesson in how losing sight of the service to the individual sounds the death knell to any enterprise. One day the taxpayer will be forced to choose a different future for healthcare, of that I am sure.

The final chapter in my family's mystery-shopping trip round the NHS (which also included successful open-heart surgery on my father—we had a tough week) was prompted by a gash to my son's forehead following an argument with a radiator.

Suffice to say that if the Accident and Emergency department's approach was extended to our local Sainsbury's, it would be closed within a week. No care would go into the appearance or tidiness of the building inside or out, you'd pay high car-parking charges on arrival, and you'd have to queue inside the shop for three or four hours before finally being allocated an appointment at the checkout till.

On the other hand, a better managed A&E might replace the plethora of confusing signs and leaflets with clear navigation, regular updates on waiting times, and something other than old copies of Bus and Coach Monthly to read. What's more, the drinks machine would work, the TV would be big enough to be viewed by people other than Superman, and there might even be comfortable seating. Nothing grand and expensive is needed; even a warm, welcoming smile to replace the "I've got too much to do, here's your number" approach would make a worthwhile difference.
None of us gets customer service right all the time, and we all face problems on an ongoing basis, but small companies at least face the daily discipline of winning hearts and wallets. It's such a shame that expensive healthcare, free at the point of delivery, can't be delivered under the same disciplines. It would be a hell of a lot better if it were.

Alex Pratt OBE is founder of seriousreaders.com and an adviser to the government on innovation and skills.