More fun with hospitals.
I mentioned here some of the problems Vic & I have been facing, most of which, I think, were more the fault of doctors than of the NHS per se. Well, Vic's just been readmitted to hospital with liquid in her lungs, so let's list some more.The lack of record-keeping is insane. Every time Vic goes into hospital, she needs to answer a load of bloody stupid questions, such as "Are you diabetic?" "Do you have any children?" All fair questions the first time you go in, but not after that. In fact, at one point, Vic was transferred from one ward to another within the same hospital, and had to go through the whole rigmarole again, speakign to people who were clearly totally unaware of her medical history, even those bits of it that had happened that day in the same building. As it happens, Vic is extremely knowledgeable about her own health matters and can not only answer the questions but can explain the answers. But I bet a lot of people don't even remember every aspect of their own medical history, let alone understand it all — do you have an IGA deficiency? Or is it, perhaps, a GIA deficiency? And what is it? — those people, presumably, get worse care in hospitals. And then there are people who are senile, or insane, or unconscious, or who don't speak English. In a sane world, all you'd need to tell the hospital staff is your name and address and they'd pull up your details on screen. In fact, we've become so used to that from every other organization on the planet that it just seems absurdly archaic for it not to happen. Not only have the NHS not entered the Computer Age, but they're not even comfortable yet in the Getting-stuff-out-of-a-filing-cabinet Age. Amazing.
Another thing about being transferred from one ward to another was that Vic was transferred to the medical assessment ward. The medical assessment ward is an extension of A&E (note for American readers: "A&E" is British for "the ER"), where new arrivals to the hospital are assessed and then kept until a bed becomes free in the part of the hospital appropriate to their condition. In other words, it is supposed to be a route into the hospital. Vic was already in the hospital, in a room off a ward. In order to transfer her to a different part of the hospital, they took her out of the bed she was in and put her into the medical assessment ward until a bed became free. This is insane.
There appears not even to be a proper way for a GP to send one of their patients to hospital, other than sending them through A&E. This has happened to Vic twice now. It is a total waste of patients' time. Even when patients are in serious danger, their time is still wasted in this way. It was possible just a few years ago for a GP to get a hospital bed for one of their patients. That mechanism has been removed, deliberately, for reasons other than patients' best interests.
The A&E doctor we saw this morning said that it is not at all surprising that Vic has liquid in her lungs, as she has recently had two of the most common causes of liquid in the lungs. In that case, why the hell was no-one looking out for it? Her GP is furious: he notes that she was sent home to recover but that, without further treatment, there was no hope that she ever would. But no-one appears to have been aware even of the possibility of that.
We've been looking into going private, unsurprisingly, and have run into an annoyance. Vic's consultant said that, to get admitted to the local private hospital, you can't just walk in; you have to be referred by a private consultant. Fair enough. But he doesn't do private consultancy, because he's loyal to the NHS for personal socialistic reasons. So, crap though the NHS is, it is, in this instance, quicker than going private. But it is only quicker because Vic's consultant refuses, for his own personal reasons, to refer any of his patients to private practice — in fact, it is not that the NHS is quicker, but that an NHS doctor is deliberately slowing down the private system for his patients. He can give us the name of a different consultant who doesn't have such scruples, we then wait for an appointment with them, then they refer us to the private clinic, then we'd be at the stage we're already at with the NHS. Or he could, if he wished, simply refer Vic to the private clinic himself, which would be far quicker. What we have here, in effect, is a case of a patient's healthcare suffering due to the clash between her political beliefs and her doctors. It's his job to look after his patients' best interests, not to make it difficult for them to go to the hospital they want to because of his own personal beliefs about the interests of a group of hypothetical patients. Fuck the Hippocratic Oath, eh?
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