Tendring Topics ….on Line
Another Encounter with the NHS
On Thursday, 7th August I was to have a relatively harmless skin cancer lesion excised from my left ear at Colchester University Hospital's Elmstead Day-Treatment Centre. The appointment, for 9.20 a.m., had been made three weeks earlier. I was half an hour early and was surprised therefore when, very shortly after I had signed in, I was told that the surgeon would like to see me right away.
I was also mildly surprised to find that the surgeon was a very pleasant young woman who was clearly desperately unhappy with the message that she had to deliver. It appeared that she had unexpectedly had to give priority to two surgical cases requiring a general anaesthetic (mine required only a 'local') and that she therefore wouldn't be able to deal with my problem today. She would arrange for me to have another appointment at the very earliest opportunity.
Well! I knew that it was not her fault, but it was no good my trying to disguise my feelings. I was bitterly disappointed. I said that I had come all the way from Clacton by taxi and that I would now have to phone for a taxi to take me home again. I told her not to bother with a fresh appointment. My ear really wasn't bothering me seriously and, if I were given another appointment, how would I know that that wouldn't be broken too? At 87 my time wasn't a commodity that I was inclined to waste on fruitless and expensive journeys!
I made my way to the waiting room, made my phone call and sat down dejectedly to wait for the taxi to arrive. A lady from Harwich, with a problem similar to mine, arrived escorted by two friends and was directed to the surgeon to be told the same thing.
Five minutes later a nurse bustled in. They thought now that they might be able to squeeze me, and just possibly the Harwich lady too, into the morning's schedule. I phoned the taxi firm again! They would contact the driver by radio and recall him. He probably wouldn't have gone too far.
Things were looking up. We were both conducted to cubicles, to change into operating theatre gowns, don our dressing gowns and then proceed to another waiting room. And wait we did; wait, wait and wait! Fortunately the Harwich lady, her two friends and I, found each other to be agreeable company. As we chatted companionably, the hours passed.
Our ordeal had begun shortly after 9.00 a.m. We were given tea and biscuits at about 11 a.m. and told that the long delay was due to an operation taking far longer than had been expected. We began to lose heart. We understood that no operations were performed in the afternoon, but when did 'afternoon' begin?
12 noon passed and 1.00 p.m. approached. Just before one, the theatre nurse came into the room. An operation that had been expected to take one hour had taken three. They deeply regretted that they wouldn't be able to deal with the Harwich lady that day but they would deal with me. I felt badly about that but it was taken very philosophically (much more so than it would have been by me!) and my place in the queue had, it appears, always been more certain.
Just after 1 p.m. I signed the 'consent form' and was taken to the operating theatre. The only painful part of my operation, for which the surgeon apologised profusely, was the injection, at half a dozen points round my ear, of the local anaesthetic. Of the operation itself I was well aware that my head was being worked upon, but I felt neither pain nor discomfort. The surgeon chatted in a relaxed and friendly way both to me and to the theatre staff throughout the operation. Asking the theatre nurse for different scalpels, pads and other pieces of equipment, I noticed that she said 'please' and 'thank you' every time. How different from the operating theatre behaviour of the imperious prima-donnas of tv's Holby City!
The operation over (I was exactly thirty minutes on the table) I was escorted back to the ward and given an excellent cup of tea and some toast, butter and jam or marmalade. It was very welcome. The time was 2.00 p.m. and I had breakfasted at 6.00 a.m.!
I was given post-operative advice and told that I would have to come back to Colchester (but to the Essex County Hospital!) in about ten days time to have the stitches removed and again in about three weeks to discuss the biopsy on my other ear. Would it really have been impossible for the stitches to be taken out and the discussion to have taken place in Clacton, or even over the phone?
Everybody in the Elmstead Day-Centre had been friendly, helpful and thoroughly professional. I couldn't have wished for better attention and service – once the members of the staff were in a position to offer it! My four hour wait and the fruitless wait of that very likeable lady from Harwich were certainly not the fault of anyone there.
They were, like so many of the ills of today's society, the result of our blind worship of Cost Effectiveness, Productivity and Profitability, Mammon's unholy trinity. Unless everyone is beavering away every minute of the working day we have a terrible fear that money is being wasted. Mammon certainly wouldn't like that! Executives work unpaid hours of overtime. Further down the ladder, operatives snatch a sandwich lunch in front of the computer that has enslaved them. Both neglect their wives, their families and their own physical and mental health.
This culture is particularly disastrous in the emergency, the medical and, in particular, the hospital services. Time and Motion studies and similar exercises ensure that sufficient staff and equipment are available to cope with an average day's work. There is 'no time to stand and stare'. Admirable perhaps, but there is also no time in which to cope with unexpected emergencies, like those two 'general anaesthetic' cases that prevented the lady from Harwich from having her operation and almost prevented me from having mine.
Emergency and Hospital Services are not really efficient unless there is enough 'slack' to accommodate the emergencies that can be depended upon to arise from time to time!
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Ankle-deep in Litter?
Not quite perhaps. The recent 'Panorama' programme on tv in which popular American travel writer Bill Bryson who (very sensibly in my opinion!) prefers to live in Britain, certainly did drive home though the seriousness of this problem in Britain today.
It is not an entirely new problem. For part of my childhood and youth I had the good fortune to live within a few hundred yards of Broomhill Park, one of Ipswich's least spoilt public open spaces. The following piece of verse, engraved on a metal plate was prominently displayed there:
Friend, when you walk, or sit and take your ease,
On moor, or fell, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bags, no scattered orange peel,
No daily journal scattered on the grass.
Others may view these with distaste – and pass.
Let no one say, and say it to your shame
That all was beauty here, until you came.
'How very twentieth century!' you may well think. Paper bags, orange peel, daily journal; for all of those it could at least be said that they were ultimately bio-degradable. While few things in the twenty-first century are built to last, third millennium litter is the exception. Our throw-away plastic bags, wrappers and containers, and our drink cans will last, if not for ever, certainly for a good deal longer than any of us.
The same can be said of litter's 'big brother'; the larger items of domestic, commercial and building waste deposited by the fly-tipper; old baths and sinks, mattresses, supermarket trolleys, broken lawn mowers, grass cuttings and garden waste, old tv sets and other electrical equipment.
Just take a look in any lay-by, in any open space and, in fact, in any space, however small, in an urban area that isn't obviously the responsibility of anyone in particular. One such small space existed just off a public footpath a few yards from my home. It was eventually cleared by the Council only to start to fill with unsavoury rubbish again within days. Now, thanks to the enterprise, vigilance and hard work of my neighbours it has been cleared and fenced off and will, I hope, attract the litter droppers and the fly-tippers no more.
On the morning following the programme about Britain's litter problem there was yet another tv programme about the yobbish and drunken behaviour of Britons abroad! Have these two social problems the same basic roots? In an age in which we are continually being told to 'respect' this, that and the other of other people's beliefs, tradition and practices and to feel pride in the British Olympic athletes and in our armed forces, have we lost our own self-respect and any sense of pride in our own communities?
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