As you will know it is my lot to have dealings with the Ambridge and District General
Hospital and its mother institution
the Borchester Royal infirmary on a regular basis as part of my day job. In
this repeated exposure it has been all too easy to become accustomed to their
working practices and assume that these are "industry standard"
throughout our fractured and beleaguered "National Health Service".
In short I've become used to an attitude of
expedient management-- a "sort and shift" mentality if you will, that does as
much (well, little) as is needed to "stabilize" a patient in the
"Assessment Unit" or if absolutely unavoidable, the ward, then boot
them home to be sorted out from home either through Out Patients, or,
increasingly often, by the practice team, doing what would normally have been
done by the admitting medical, surgical or other specialist team as
appropriate.
In part it's been our fault for accepting that
this is the status quo, but it's also a mark of a prevailing attitude in our
cash strapped area the patients are the enemy, to be kept out of hospital at all
costs (or more accurately on the flawed assumption that being kept out
"saves" the cost of a bed). Of course these savings never truly accrue since
an empty bed is just a bed available for somebody else to occupy, which they
pretty much inevitably do.
Over the past year we have had occasion, as a
family, to have dealings with the Dreaming Spires University Hospitals Trust on
a couple of occasions. Sadly the latest had the unhappiest of outcomes, but the
prevailing attitude of the hospitals we have had to deal with, the care
lavished on us and the expectation that a patient remains the centre of
attention, the recipient of genuine care and attention and not an
inconvenience, has been startling.
It has been all too easy to accept that the
traditional virtues of caring have been ground out of the system by relentless “make-work”
target setting and an obsession with counting things, but looking, as I have
had to, further afield, whilst those targets still apply elsewhere, the bunker
mentality does not and patients are still that, namely “sufferers” deserving of
support through adversity, and not either commercial transactions to be shifted
in bulk to maximize income, or threats by their mere presence to the meeting of
targets for maximum trolley waits or other nonsensical metrics.
It is probably no coincidence that the DSUHT is
well funded where the A&DGH and BRI are financial basket cases, so I can't
help wishing that, with the same expedience with which I relocated the
"surgery" to Ambridge all those years ago when this blog was a mere
babe in arms, I could wave a wand and relocate again to the Dreaming Spires.
But until I can the poor Ambridge & District can expect me to be on their case on a weekly
basis to remind them of what they used to be about and should be again.
It saddens me greatly to have to say this, but I
fervently hope that in the event that I or those closest to me have the
misfortune to be ill and in need of hospital care, we can contrive to do so in
the land of the Dreaming Spires and not here in apparently idyllic Borchester.
