My 86 year old Grandfather was admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties, was not provided with a bedpan or otherwise assisted and so got up to use the lavatory, fell and broke his hip, died over days. There was an inquest; hospital staff had neglected my Grandfather, lied and falsified records.
So, that was not a nice situation. And ultimate outcome aside, the lying and mismanagement aside, and at the risk of sounding like a Daily Mail reader, attitudes of the nursing staff were… Odd. Half of the nursing staff were attentive and caring and clever and marvellous, the other half were downright hostile. I remember Granddad was frightened and agitated and needed a sedative, I found the ward sister and told her, all smiles and pleases and thank yous, and she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Wouldn’t talk to me. There isn’t another side to this story; I hadn’t punched a nurse, I hadn’t made a fuss. That’s it; my Granddad was dying and she treated me like… I don’t know what. Worse than an inconvenience. I don’t know what the fuck that was about, but it was upsetting and weird. You can come across some weird people in the NHS, thinking on.
For a more mundane experience, I went to casualty the first time I had an ocular migraine (vision disturbance, limb weakness, facial numbness, “brain fog”), and they told me to go to the optician.
I think that was pretty poor, really, since I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel half of my face and one arm, couldn’t speak and couldn’t think, and was concerned enough to be driven into hospital at midnight. I don’t think that should have been dismissed as “needs new contacts prescription”, really.
What infuriates me is the big to-do that is made of the “choice” I have to go to, say, a drop-in centre or to choose my hospital (as if I can choose a hospital!), and how “choice” in general is a mantra of the NHS, but how this translates as a “choice” between waiting two hours in the crap drop-in centre on my doorstep that ultimately cannot help, or “choosing” to wait two weeks to see my GP. Woo hoo, choice.
I don’t want a fucking choice, I want consistency.
Drop-in centres in particular are, in my experience, worse than useless. I’ve been twice in desperation, and both times I’ve left in tears. I was told that a particularly butchery UTI was my period (Oh no, it wasn’t. I went into shock on the lavatory and, weeping and shaking, bodged something with an expired box of co-proxamol and someone else’s leftover Amoxicillin, before passing out. I was subsequently chastised for using antibiotics not prescribed for me. Huh), and a particularly obnoxious medical I-don’t-know-what patronised the living shit out of me and “couldn’t feel” the enormous neck lump that I was worried enough to bring to her attention because - shock - I couldn’t see my doctor for two weeks. (The doctor could feel it just fine and agreed with my concern, and ultimately I’m fine, but the point is that I was made to feel like a fool and a timewaster for bringing it up).
GPs, in my experience, are not particularly joined-up. I can’t see a doctor out of work hours unless I wait two weeks (and if I call the split-second the office opens at 8am, otherwise the one appointment I can make is taken). If the doctor agrees that I need a blood test, that’s another two weeks to see the nurse, and another two weeks to see the doctor again, and then another unspecified time to see a specialist - I don’t know, I haven’t got that far.
This really sounds like I’m down on the NHS. I’m not; I’m team socialised healthcare, woo. I just wish it were more joined up, less bureaucratic, and that some people in it were retrained or fired or something, because when you encounter a horrible, incompetent fanny when you’re ill, it’s so much more affecting and terrible than if you do it, say, in a bank. I would trust the NHS to sort me out in an accident. I would. And I know that so many people in the NHS are downright saintly and hard-working and brilliant, and I’ve had personal experience of several, though this is not the thread. And I know it’s wrong to be bankrupted over medical bills, so there you are. I’ve just had some bad experiences over - apart from Granddad - fairly mundane stuff. I wish it worked better. That’s all.