Rarely, if ever, does this blog enter the political arena. Almost eight months after I began these musings, I defy anyone who doesn’t know me as a close personal friend to say which way I voted at the 2010 General Election - and then you might still be wrong.
Although I have a degree in politics, I generally keep my views to myself. Sure, I watch BBC Parliament far more than is healthy, I choose The World At One and PM as my radio listening of choice, but I would no more start a political argument in a pub than order a pint of Carling.
But the current furore over the Government’s planned reform of the National Health Service has prompted me into putting finger to keyboard.
I like the NHS; in fact, I owe my life to it. Having been born in 1964 with spina bifida and hydrocephalus and being the only one of three siblings who survived more than a few days with it, I am eternally grateful to the GPs and consultants who pulled me through my early childhood. The shock when it came back to bite me in the rear in the form of epileptic fits which I had not suffered for more than 40 years was crippling, in both a mental and physical sense.
Over the past few years since the return of my epilepsy, I have spent rather too long in surgery waiting rooms, in consultants’ offices, having blood tests, brain scans and the like. Mrs W has endured similar experiences for different reasons; and we and many like us will tell the politicians arguing over the fate of the NHS that it does not need more competition. It does not need opening up to the free market; all the vast majority of people who use the NHS on an occasional basis want it to do is to work in a joined-up fashion.
Let me tell you a story. Here is a patient who needs to have three tests done at an eye clinic. The patient is not yet suffering from any condition but has a family history so the NHS, quite rightly, is monitoring the situation every three months.
Yet the patient receives three separate appointments for three separate tests on three separate dates and it requires the patience of a saint and numerous telephone calls to persuade the authorities that it would be a good idea to do them all on the same day.
The patient subsequently books the morning off work and attends a local hospital, only to discover that the clinic is only able to complete two of the three tests and wants the patient to return at a later date for the third - meaning more time off work.
Cue a full and frank discussion as the patient produces a letter from their GP, confirming that all three tests will be done on the same day. Cue a harrassed receptionist, seeking a way out of the problem.
A solution is eventually found and the first two tests take place just a few minutes after the appointed time. The patient is then told to go and have a cup of coffee in the restaurant as they have 20 minutes to wait before their appointment with the consultant.
Duly refreshed, they return to the waiting room at the required time to find precisely three people ahead of them in the queue - and wait a further 90 minutes before being called in to the inner sanctum.
Harrassed, tired, hungry and needing to get to work 20 miles away lest they let down colleagues, they undergo the test......which takes less than five minutes.
Completely oblivious to their feelings, the consultant announces that nothing has changed since their last visit, “so I’ll see you in nine months. Goodbye.”
And the authorities wonder why patients often have a dim view of doctors.
I wonder how many MPs, the people in whose hands the fate of the NHS lies, have undergone that experience? How many have turned up at A&E at 9pm on a Saturday night, frightened for the health of their 80-year-old mother and still been there at 4.30am on Sunday?
Politicians can talk until they are blue/red in the face about turning patients into stakeholders, into giving GPs control of their budgets, but all of it is meaningless until they can answer some basic questions. How can a patient arrive at their local hospital and produce a letter of which the consultant seems completely unaware? How can four consultations take 90 minutes? How can some doctors be so astoundingly rude to worried, anxious, patients?
Until our politicians see the argument from the other side of the desk, all talk of NHS reform is nonsense.
No comments:
Post a Comment