Six NHS staff have worked for an hour tonight to help a very angry, psychologically troubled man who, from his abusive language, definitely doesn’t want to be helped. I’ve not seen the Noddy Holder voiced gentleman at the end of the ward, but he’s very loud and very abusive. I’m not sure if he’s violent, but a nurse here tells me it’s common to be punched or to be on the receiving end of a cup of hot tea. I visualise this noisy chap as a large viking, such is the depth of his voice.
Truth be told he shouldn’t be here on a regular ward, but apparently it’s his third visit. He’s eating up resources and the staff have better things to do with their skills than act as enforcers. He’s disrupting sleep for all patients, which likely slows recovery and increases costs. An overwhelmed A&E dept could do with a couple of these excellent hard working NHS people I’m sure.
It’s not an uncommon story, my mother lives above a very similar individual who is bouncing in and out of hospital. Each time he returns home he can’t cope and falls. My mother hears his pleas and calls for an ambulance. Sometimes police resources are impacted. I suspect the viking I described is also bouncing between social disruption in his community and hospital readmission with subsequent staff resource reallocation.
The staff here are beyond hard working, I witnessed a nurse change a bed in under 30 seconds as an elderly gentleman waited desperately to collapse back down from his walking frame following an assisted toilet visit. Once secured in his bed she was off at speed to fit in much needed observations of other patients, each time interrupted by a support bell, typically to help an ageing person visit a toilet. It’s the same story for all the nurses here, frankly I’m not sure I would even turn up to work when faced with the level of abuse and fatigue. It shouldn’t be legal.
Both of the NHS resource drains I describe here, of extreme mental health needs and basic care home support need to be fully reviewed and then separated from the body of NHS hospital support services. They are most likely key factors in the ‘Broken NHS’ messaging we hear of each day. “They just can’t see it at the top” a continually jolly staff member told me as he trudged off for a break with his pillows for some much needed shut-eye having wrestled a viking.
I like to think I’m not a huge drain on this ward as I take my intravenous antibiotics following an infection that spiked my temperature at the end of my first chemotherapy session yesterday. But we are all in our own way of course using NHS resources. We all pay our taxes for births, broken bones and scans and that seems fair. Many of us would pay more. However I’m personally not constantly pinging for nurse support to walk to a toilet before I soil myself, I’m also not shouting “Hulk Smash!” for an hour, day and night.
I’m doing my best to entertain Peter, my dementia suffering roommate of 85 years of age. I do it for him and I do it to support the staff and reduce his need frequency. He needs the reassurance that comes with terror at waking up from naps in a strange place, with no knowledge of injury or sometimes era.
Peter is also an old man, a former 45 Commando Royal Marine and he has stories like all old men. “Have you ever been potato picking?” he asked me out of the blue yesterday. As an avid gardener he asked the right question. Peter was forced to pick potatoes as a school boy in Banstead apparently. “The whole school did it” he said. You don’t hear of that sort of forced labour fundraiser any more do you? He was also caned six times for “mischief” and thankfully you don’t hear of that any more either.
As I walked the empty corridors of the hospital at 2am to try and wear off the chemotherapy steroids, I stopped to read the many staff profile lists presented brilliantly on the walls outside the children’s services unit. So many amazing profiles to see. Such love and good will on offer to keep us all well.
I strolled past the birthing ward that delivered our first baby 17 years ago (somewhat traumatically) and our second calm c-section baby in 2010. The very same unit that saved my wife’s life from an ectopic rupture in 2013. This hospital and its people has given me so much life and they’re doing it again now with my Hodgkins Lymphoma treatment.
We can’t let the NHS go, it’s part of ALL of us, it just needs some proper restructuring to relieve the pressures on vital life supporting systems at ground level. Let the nurses and doctors do their jobs. Give the striking nurses and doctors their pay rises. The NHS is a bloody marvel, it’s what makes Britain Great, in large part thanks to the most multicultural and diverse set of staff you could ever meet in any organisation.
