Tag Archives: NHS

Gill’s Story – the NHS at 75

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The 75th anniversary of the NHS feels like the right time to share Gill’s story.

My friend Gill was a nurse for many years, starting back in her teens, working in youth care and elderly care. She has scars on her arms from being bitten by a dementia patient, and was invalided out of work after a patient threw himself at her and damaged her spine. She was lucky not to be paralysed. She now also has a wasting disease.

She wrote to me in late January after a difficult spell in hospital, with some cancer-like symptoms. The daily news rounds at the time were dominated by stories of the NHS in unprecedented crisis. Patients dying in corridors. Ambulances queuing and missing entire shifts. OAPs lying unattended for hours with broken limbs on their kitchen floors.

Here is what she wrote. Gill has given me permission to share. Please remember this was not intended for publication. I have edited only lightly, for clarity and to respect privacy.

Thank you Dom, I’m home now, hopefully I will stay at home now. I’m on double antibiotics and stronger painkillers, for five days, if I’m no better, I have to go back in. For tests. They think it’s either my bowel or ovary. There’s a lot of bowel cancer in my family. It’s probably a diverticulitis infection. At least I’m not in agony now. They couldn’t find a slot for me to have a CT scan until next week, understandably they keep slots free for people in life threatening circumstances. I have an appointment on 26th unless I’m bad again.

There were two nurses in the surgical assessment unit, where patients were coming back for surgery. They had to wait for two more nurses to come from another ward, to get a paralysed man into bed because they have to have one nurse per limb because they can be sued, if he got hurt. He was so demanding, absolutely horrid to the staff. First it was because there was no ambulance available to take him to his nursing home. He was shouting and calling the nurses callous evil devils. I’ll spare you the bad language.

This young man, another patient, started really shouting at him. He said “You are just so low. These nurses are trying their best to look after us.” He said, “Don’t you watch the news and read papers? People are actually dying from the lack of ambulances.”

The paralysed inpatient patient said, “It’s left wing propaganda! It’s not real. These lefty unions are trying to bring down a democratically elected government.”

The young lad said, “You are witnessing it and you still can’t see it!”

The inpatient seemed to be demanding every few minutes. “Nurse I need a drink.” “Nurse I need my meds.” “Nurse get me a bed now, if I have to stay in this god-forsaken hole.”

Then a man, Len, came in in agony. The nurse was doing his obs, then Mr Inpatient said, “Just because I’m a Conservative you do nothing for me.”

The young lad said, “You sit there and admit you are the cause of this.”

A little later, Len, the really poorly man slumped over and I noticed his breathing had altered, so I went down the ward to the nurse, who was with another patient, and told her. She ran back up the ward to him, called the other nurse and the two of them got him into bed and got him oxygen and called the doctor in.

Mr Impatience started shouting again. “Nurse get me a drink now.” So I got out of bed and poured him a cup of water and took it to him. He said, “At least someone cares, thank you. You should do this job.”

I said, “I did – I was a nurse until I became disabled.”

He said, “Oh so you’re a benefit scrounger are you?”

I felt like throwing the water in his face.

I said to him, “Look, think yourself lucky that you can sit here demanding everything every couple of minutes. The nurses are with that other man [Len] because he’s in a life threatening situation. That’s why I went to get the nurse.”

The young man said to him, “Do you get disability benefit?”

He said, “Yes, I’m entitled. I’m disabled. I’m paralysed.”

He said, “So are a lot of people you describe as scroungers.” He pointed at me – he had seen me pass out twice the night before – and said, “Just because Gill isn’t physically paralysed… you’re not a doctor… how can you call her a scrounger?”

Then something happened. Mr Impatience apologised to me, and for voting Tory.

I said to him, “Can’t you see the nurses have to choose – who is in danger of losing their lives? They have to treat them first.”

He didn’t realise these two nurses were looking after twenty eight of us.

After they got the other two staff, and they got him into bed, he apologised to the nurses too.

He said we had opened his eyes to what was going on. The young lad offered to take him over to the window to see the ambulances queuing. He looked at me and said, “Is it really happening?”

I said, “Sadly it really is.”

One of the nurses said, “It’s heartbreaking. People are dying, who shouldn’t.”

When the sister was checking me out, she said, “Thank you for talking to him. And for probably saving Len, the man with breathing problems.”

I saw my GP. She thinks I may have cancer in my ovary. She said she will refer me to a gynaecologist for an urgent app. I’ve known her for over 20 years. She was very sad, she said in the community, you form a bond with your patients and to see this lottery of care happening, is heartbreaking. She said after all you have done and continue to do for youth care and elderly care in the area. She said, “I will explain what you have done for the community but it could be months until you are seen.”

Sorry for the essay, I got carried away. Stay safe and well – love to you and your family.

Gill’s GP was right. Gill was finally seen in the hospital on June 20th – five months after the above – to investigate her cancer symptoms. She was advised to be ready to stay in if the tests indicated urgent surgery.

Unfortunately, another emergency prevented the consultant seeing Gill, and although Gill underwent the CT and other tests, last time I checked, she was still in the dark as to the results.

Article: You Do The Maths

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Today PM Sunak, in a bid to look like a man who stands for something, is suggesting maths should be compulsory in the last two years of school.

You could be forgiven for feeling outraged.

While the NHS crumbles before our eyes, and, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, between 300 and 500 Brits are dying every week as a result of delays to emergency care alone – wow – our Prime Minister wants to talk about maths for 17 year olds. It’s not exactly bold politics. The politics of the absurd, maybe.

Or is it? Maybe it’s a great idea.

Maybe we’d be better off if we were more maths literate.

Maybe more of us would understand that, with the Tories’ terrible record on growth, our country is poorer.

 

With greater maths literacy, maybe more of us would know that Tory austerity mentality actually costs us dear – their terrible public services go hand in glove with sky-rocketing debt. The British people end up getting much less, for much more.

With greater maths literacy, perhaps more of us would know that, with the Tories, wages consistently fall, and after 12 years they haven’t even reached 2009 levels.

More maths awareness might make us a wiser population. A population with higher earnings, a growing economy to pay for public services, and a population carrying less public debt.

More maths might not solve our current NHS crisis, and it wouldn’t save the 300-500 Britons dying this week and next.

But it might make us aware of what we choose when we vote at the ballot box. And those choices do save lives.

More maths awareness is Tory turkeys voting for Christmas. Bring it on.

Article: In the mid-90s I set fire to myself

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In the mid-90s I set fire to myself. My sister and her husband arrived for dinner from the Isle of Wight. I turned up the gas on the stove and threw the pasta into the boiling water.

As they came in I turned to greet them. The kitchen in our little flat was tiny. I leaned back and saw their faces turn from glad-to-be-here to sheer horror. Then I felt the flames at my back. My shirt was on fire.

I’ll spare you the details but I was extensively burnt. At Hammersmith A&E I waited many hours with no treatment for a doctor to examine me, just a protective pad over my back.

As I waited in pain I consoled myself that I was faring better than the previous occupant of my cubicle: it was spattered with blood, in an impressive, murder-scene arc.

Eventually an exhausted young doctor examined me. She was so tired that she did not lift the pad, but saw some exposed burns near it, and thought them minor. A nurse had to lift the pad and show her the full extent of my burns.

My injuries would have been better if I had not had to wait hours without treatment, but they were not so bad as to require admission. I was cleaned up and bandaged up and told to return daily.

On my next visit, a doctor asked a nurse to clean up my burns. I heard muttering outside and then the doctor exploded. “We’re in a major London A&E – are you telling me we don’t have a disinfectant to clean this patient’s burns?” That WAS what they were telling him.

Eventually the doctor asked for saline and hydrogen peroxide and mixed them and cleaned me up himself. After a few days, I began to feel really fragile. Going by bus to the hospital was really uncomfortable. I boarded slowly and carefully, irritating others.

When the bus jolted and I hit my back, I wanted to cry out. I was exhausted and in pain and remembered feeling: this could be what it feels like to be old in the city and not getting the care you need.

Several days after my accident, I was back again in the A&E cubicles awaiting another dressing change. I realized it was the same cubicle I had lain in for hours on that fateful night. It had the same arced blood spatter on the walls, now old and dried and so very, very grim.

Back on the bus, sitting forward and hanging on tight like an old man, a rage grew inside me and I thought: our NHS is screwed. We have to do something. We cannot just let this happen. I got in touch with my local Labour Party and signed up.

I wasn’t a campaigner back then, but I followed politics with a new keenness. I was in my mid twenties and already feeling vulnerable. I wanted a healthcare system that would see me through, and there was every sign that that was a pipe dream. No disinfectant in A&E, FFS.

John Smith died and I watched the hustings for the new Labour leader. Prescott, Beckett and this young guy, Blair. Blair looked nervous as hell, but spoke with vision and optimism. Three years later, Britain was a different place, with a future ahead of it, a sense of renewal and community.

The NHS was rebuilt. A four-hour limit was set on A&E waiting times. Spending was raised to the EU average. Treatment waiting lists steadily shortened. I had started a family and my fear that the health service might, some day, cease to be there for us fell away.

I forgot all about that moment in 1994. The long painful wait in the night. The obviously overworked doctor. The absence of disinfectant. The uncleaned cubicle. Those days were gone. By the end of the Labour government, the NHS was our proudest boast.

The NHS, still, for the 2012 Olympics, was THE thing that united us and even defined us. But it didn’t come to define us by accident. It did so as a result of a Labour government’s steady investment, commitment and reform. It wasn’t perfect, but oh boy, it was better.

And yet here we are again. The NHS is in existential crisis. On Sunday, Royal College of Emergency Medicine president Dr Adrian Boyle said between 300 and 500 people were dying every week as a result of delays to emergency care. Once again, we must hope and push for a decent government to restore it. It will come. It will happen. But meanwhile, many of us will have our confidence tested, and our sense of security stripped away.

Some of us will wait too long in pain for acute or chronic care. Others may pay the ultimate price of bad government. If you are worried, as I was and as I am, do something. Hold on tightly on the bus, get home and join a progressive party. Campaign. Win. And #takebackBritain.

The Power of Love – how Johnson hijacked our affection for the NHS

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“The boss”, as his sycophant colleagues insist on calling him, is back. Like a caped crusader, recovered from a brush with kryptonite. Physically weakened, perhaps, but with new, heroic resolve to take on the enemy. Vim, my friends, and vigour. Grit and guts.

But many found Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Downing Street back-to-work address nauseating. Not least because he made almost no mention of the astonishing suffering and loss of life, or the cloud of grief descending upon our land, talking instead of the UK’s “apparent success” in combating the “invisible mugger” that is Coronavirus.

How does a man who has presided over the calamity of our lifetimes dare to stand in front of us and talk of “success”? A man whose inaction and hubris in January and February – not to mention those fateful, shameful eleven days in March – was tantamount to welcoming the Covid-19 “mugger” into the UK with open arms and a free (blue) passport. With the country on course to have one of the worst per capita death tolls in the world; with 45,000 or so lives already lost; with families grieving up and down the land and unable even to attend funerals; with 5,000 new cases a week, what on earth was he thinking?

The answer is there in plain sight – in his relentless insistence on “protecting the NHS”. (Rich, I know, coming from the Tories who have choked the NHS for a decade, frozen nurses’ pay, demonized its European staff, and who even now fail it on a daily basis with their incapacity to deliver basic equipment – and yet they have the temerity to clap on Thursdays and call it “our NHS” … But bear with me. The sheer unlikelihood of the Tories suddenly falling in love with state provision is the clue to understanding Johnson’s evident satisfaction with the current state of affairs.)

Remember Johnson’s “powered by love” speech after coming out of hospital, on 12th April? He waxed lyrical about the NHS, his nurses Jenny and Luis, and about the spirit of the British people, whose lockdown struggle was elevated – by sheer power of grandiose rhetoric – from fretting at home to a heroic defence of the nation and its health service, conjuring up images of brave Brits linking arms around the perimeters of our hospitals, ready to repel for Queen and country.

“We are making progress in this national battle because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset: our National Health Service.”         (12 April 2020)

This idea of the public as some sort of people’s army championing the NHS, though vividly painted here, wasn’t new. It’s been there in our daily diet for some time now. We’ve been exhorted not, as might have been expected, simply to stay at home and (thereby) save lives, but to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.

What work is this extra clause doing? It doesn’t change the overall instruction. It doesn’t give us anything more to do or not do. Our lockdown cabin fever stays the same. As instructions go, “Protect the NHS” is a weird one. Its insertion feels like a “tell”. And the way it sits awkwardly in the middle like that, it sometimes feels like the ‘protecting the NHS’ part is more important than the ‘saving lives’ part. Sometimes the graphics reflect that feeling, too.

Of course, the notion of us protecting the NHS is the wrong way round. Notwithstanding our duty – shamefully neglected – to protect its staff, the NHS is there to protect us. That’s its purpose. Our “greatest national asset” is not the NHS, it is us, the people. The clue is in the name: it’s a service. Our service. To protect us and care for us. But Johnson congratulates us for forming a human shield around it, as if our job were to sacrifice our lives for it, rather than turning to it for salvation in our gritless, gutless hour of need.

Of course, the NHS can only protect us if we don’t overwhelm it. There’s no doubt that we have all had to play our part in flattening the curve, otherwise the NHS wouldn’t have been able to cope. Flattening the curve has meant we’ve delivered patients at a steadier pace, and nurses like Johnson’s Jenny and Luis have, just, been able to manage. Fewer people will have died than would have been the case if the patients had all presented in one big wave. We get that. We know why we’ve stayed at home.

But our core interest is in saving lives. For us, the NHS is a means to that end, not an end in itself. In contrast, Johnson’s language reveals, time and again, that his priority is to be able to say that the NHS has coped, no matter how many people have died. Saving lives is secondary. Saving lives is in smaller print. When he describes the NHS as “the beating heart of this country”, it’s as if he has substituted the NHS for the people; as if he has forgotten the actual beating hearts of the country. And indeed the ones which have stopped beating.

“We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country… It is unconquerable.”      (12 April 2020)

This warped love for the NHS makes sense if his greatest fear has not, in fact, been a death toll the size of the entire WWII Blitz. It makes sense if, on the contrary, his greatest fear has been the dire imagery of an NHS in collapse. Large numbers of patients dying unattended in corridors, or in ambulances queueing outside. Medics despairing. Emergency services unable to respond. All manner of collateral chaos. The inevitable media reports would be beyond his control, and his premiership would likely be over. The images would endure for generations.

That collapse has, somehow, and mercifully, been avoided. The unfolding care home disaster, which has involved the exporting of demise to disparate locations, far from the hospital front lines, may be part of the explanation. And shattered, lethally under-equipped NHS staff might say that calamity has been far closer than the public realises.

Certainly the families of those staff who have lost their lives will find little comfort in the idea of the NHS having been spared complete collapse. Their worlds have been destroyed. The same goes for the families of all of the 45,000+ victims. There is no consolation for them.

But for Johnson, the difference between near-breakdown and total breakdown is all the difference in the world. The optics of a visibly collapsed NHS would likely have been terminal. An ocean of kryptonite from which, this time, there could be no heroic return. The unconquerable would have been conquered. But the invisible deaths of coronavirus, in which loved ones disappear into an ambulance never to be seen again, seem not, yet, to be damaging him.

Small wonder, then, that in his back-to-work address, he saw no problem in stepping over the invisible dead, and talking instead about our “progress” and our “apparent success”. Because, from where he’s standing, a vital mission has indeed been accomplished. The mission, at all costs, to prevent the NHS from appearing to be in meltdown. The mission to save face. The mission, ultimately, to save Boris.

“We defied so many predictions. We did not run out of ventilators or ICU beds. We did not allow our NHS to collapse.”      (27 April 2020)

Johnson and his sycophants have not suddenly fallen in love with the notion of state health care. They don’t profess to love the NHS because it saves you and me. They love it because – for as long as it appears, however narrowly, to be coping – the NHS saves them.

“… if we could stop our NHS from being overwhelmed, then we could not be beaten… ”       (12 April 2020)

Our “human shield” around the NHS is really a shield around the incompetence and arrogance of a Prime Minister who was repeatedly warned there was a “mugger” on the path ahead, but blithely took us that way anyway.

Since then, he has sought to mug us, by hijacking our appreciation for the NHS and twisting it with weasel word-play into a truly remarkable political bomb-shelter. So far, he must be thinking, “apparent success.”

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