Last week I took my father-in-law to Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham.
This is the major teaching hospital that I arrived at as a fresh-faced, newly appointed Senior House Officer (SHO) in August 1995.
I lived in the residences at the back of the hospital and some weeks worked 120 hours due to shortages in staff and on-call rotas.
I pushed my father-in-law (Mike) in his wheelchair through the main central corridor that I used to walk through in the middle of the night to get to A&E to see guys who had punched themselves nearly to death and needed suturing up or had fractured mandibles.
Mike and I went into cardiology west so that he could have an ECG and sat down to wait and to watch and to listen.
Everyone is run utterly ragged. The lady on reception was struggling to cope when normally she would have 2 other colleagues and it was just her and it’s been that way for a while by the looks of things.
People were turning up without cards written, without request forms or without any sort of electronic pre-administration. She was complaining (nicely) to everyone that it was difficult to manage when people turned up unexpectedly and as you looked around, she was working in a place with no windows and lots of vicious signs on the walls and an environment which was so dated that it would drag you back into the 1970’s.
Mike had his ECG taken relatively quickly by a lovely ECG technician but again someone who’s massively underappreciated and has a limited chance of progression through a system to a better place and encouragement for further learning and development.
And so, we trotted round with the ECG trace on paper in a brown envelope (everyone is given their ECG trace on paper in a brown envelope) to see the consultant who is a friend of mine.
With the obvious covid spacing and attempts to try to mitigate the risk of a viral spread and lots of people who are enormously caring and enormously thoughtful trying to do the best they can for the never-ending stream of patients who are broken and turn up waiting to be fixed.
Again, we saw my friend the consultant who is a brilliant man, who is massively caring and hugely knowledgeable but who runs his clinics in a room with no windows and a constant frustration due to the lack of staff or the variable attitude of some of the other clinical members of the team.
Our healthcare outcome was brilliant and a trip to that environment gave us exactly what we wanted and what we needed but it’s not hard to see that it’s just about coping and just about managing and actually on the brink of not.
Maybe I’m looking at things through the eyes of a 50-year-old instead of the eyes of a fresh faced 23-year-old who turned up all those years ago but I’m really going to try my best to stay out of there as a patient and although that’s not entirely within my gift or yours, I suggest you do the same.
It really is time that we all had a conversation about how we can change the delivery of healthcare in the UK to take the stress and strain off these guys and to allow them to work in a better place because of the enormously important things they do.
A little later that week I sat down at dinner with two medics (one of whom was my friend and mentor Phil Hollows who is a recently retired consultant, who sadly had an MI very soon after retirement). Phil’s wife is a GP, and we discussed the possibility of opening up an independent menopause clinic to help women struggling with all the issues related to that and give them a service in a nice place with people who are not stressed out and who just have the time and resources to give the care that people are looking for.
We were just spitballing (it will never happen for us) but all of these opportunities are opening up, it’s just about trying to find people that care enough to put a service together that’s empathic and of high quality that the middle classes can spend some of the excess money that they have, so that we can free up the rest of the services available for those who are not fortunate enough to be able to buy themselves out of trouble.
Blog Post Number - 2985
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