Sunday, October 15, 2006
Doesn't it just make you sick ?
Sorry for the sardonic tone. This article has me apoplectic. How the NHS has been taken over in this fashion (or was it always like this but we were never informed before?) and made into some sort of screen to healthcare provision, rather than a health service provider, is beyond my comprehension. Though, to be honest, I just experienced the dilatoriness and plain down-right inefficiency of the hospital service at first hand in a reasonably serious instance which by its nature clears up pretty quick. No names no pack drill.
I blame in large part the person or committee of worthies (yes, I rememebr now - it was a way to pump up nurses pay ) who changed nursing to some sort of quasi-graduate profession by giving them 'degrees' in nursing rather than the original diplomas, SRN and SEN. I remember seeing a t.v. prog. years ago with nurses doing sociology lecturers in Newcastle I believe, and wondered what had happened. The sociology of the bedpan? Prof. Laurie Taylor, can you help us out here?
NHS centres 'rationing consultant visits'
Beezy Marsh, Health Correspondent, Telegraph, 15 October 2006
In my case on exit from the hospital ward, I had to make sure I had the canula removed from my arm before departure, and had the right drugs (in the end it was was left till I left: rather than brought to my bedside all calm, I was incandescent with rage when told as I departed the ward, entered the pharmacy and told it would take up to 2 hours to be doled out my prescription. I told them to ***** it and walked out without them.)
Although the reason I was in hospital was relatively straight forward and I expected that priority cases in casuality would be, well, prioritised, I did not expect to wait there for six and a half hours before being taken to a ward, have to call out for food and water and have the complete Acicident and Emergency Team turn around in silence to me as if i had said "I have the plague". Then grudgingly provive a sandwich and a drink. In actual fact, I had been administered a drug by my G,P. only days before which I learnt by assiduous web-research causes dehydration. So it was not a normal thirst: it was a raging thirst and was implicated in the onset of my condition another twice, once while I lay there, another asstood outside at one point desperately trying to ring people to let them know where I was on my mobile (getting someone to pay attention to you to lend you the house phone was quite difficult as the whole casualty department seemed to be swearing and shoutung and in a bubble of their own).
I always did have a jaundiced eye about the NHS from my days as a student when I did a long stint in a London hospital as a porter. Although there were pockets of decency and good work, in the main I saw the NHS as, in essence a giant, make-work programme. My view has only hardened over the years. This may be because I am rather exacting in my standards, seeing it the duty of someone in such a vital role in our lives actually to look as if they cared about caring for us. The level of ennui and self-centredness I came across showed how lax the system had become even nearly 40 years ago. Matron certainly did not keep it buzzing, even in those days.
