{"id":519,"date":"2021-12-03T10:51:04","date_gmt":"2021-12-03T10:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=519"},"modified":"2021-12-29T11:40:54","modified_gmt":"2021-12-29T11:40:54","slug":"the-nhs-whats-wrong-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=519","title":{"rendered":"The NHS – what’s wrong with it?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The NHS \u2013 what\u2019s wrong with it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My excuse for not doing one of these \u201cblogs\u201d for many months is that we have been caught up in a medical emergency that has made any urge to write blogs, or even poetry, feel redundant – \u201cbeside the point\u201d somehow. No, not the international Covid Pandemic emergency, but our own on-going family crisis. I think I mentioned several blogs back that my \u201cwife\u201d (what an old-fashioned term that now sounds!) had begun to suffer from rheumatoid polymyalgia? Weaning herself off the diet of steroids that had been prescribed for that condition, this past year Vic began to find that, underlying her polymyalgia, she has in fact been developing osteoarthritis in both her hips \u2013 a development that had been masked by the heavy use of steroids for the polymyalgia.\u00a0 This past year Vic\u2019s mobility has deteriorated from being able to walk up to ten miles to becoming wheelchair dependent and hardly able to crawl up our short flight of stairs. Clearly hip replacement operations were going to be our main hope for a more mobile and pain-free future. But of course the local GP services feel to have become almost unreachable over the last 18 months, being overburdened with extra Covid duties and extra protective precautions as well as being hampered by staff shortages. At best we were able to arrange telephone consultations with what seemed like an ever-changing panel of doctors – sometimes after hours of waiting in phone queues. (Perhaps they should call us \u201cimpatients\u201d rather than \u201cpatients\u201d?)\u00a0 One locum did arrange for X rays to be taken of Vic\u2019s hips while another doctor arranged for her to be seen by a specialist nurse and, less usefully, by a physiotherapist.\u00a0 The specialist nurse wrote a letter to the medical practice about Vic\u2019s condition marked “Urgent” \u2013 but that letter was mislaid because the named locum had already left the practice. \u00a0Nothing at all was done about the X-rays which, we now know, clearly showed the serious condition of both hips, with bone grating on bone, almost no cartilage left. Meanwhile we began to hear, through news media but also through meeting fellow sufferers, of long tailbacks of patients waiting for hip replacements in our Shropshire area, many having to wait for months, even years, for their operations \u201con the NHS\u201d. The upshot of so much delay (I suspect the medical practices of stalling, going slow, to stop these \u201cnon-urgent elective” tailbacks growing ever longer) is that we have been forced to \u201cgo private\u201d to arrange relief for the increasing pain which poor Vic has been enduring since April.\u00a0 In theory this queue-jumping is against my political principles – to me the introduction of a National Health Service was one of the great achievements of the first Labour government and Vic herself worked for the NHS for 40 years \u2013 but in practice ethical principles weigh nothing when measured against watching some loved one suffering ceaseless pain day and night. So, again theoretically against my principles, we have been forced to \u201cpull strings\u201d to see the relevant senior consultant who happens to be a college friend of Vic\u2019s ex-consultant relative (\u201cIt\u2019s not what you know it\u2019s who you know\u201d<\/em> should now become my new Tory-boy motto?) and to jump queues by paying about \u00a312,000 per hip for her to be operated on more quickly. Since paying up front we have had exemplary attention and treatment. Vic had her first hip replacement operation three weeks ago and is promised the second hip replacement within 3 months. Meanwhile, when I stroll up the High Street for our daily shopping needs, I feel assailed by a variety of elderly cripples, some on crutches, some pushing walking frames, and one or two riding those neat little motorised buggies\u00a0 – all (or so I guiltily imagine) without the ready cash and personal \u201cpush power\u201d to obtain treatment for their aging hips. \u00a0This squeezing of middle-class patients towards private sector solutions seems to be occurring in many different areas of the Health Service. It is certainly so in Dentistry \u2013 \u00a0as our NHS dentist daughter informs us\u2026and for multifarious other non-life-threatening medical conditions too? \u00a0To be fair to the GPs, attention to the \u201cmore serious\u201d ailments (heart disease or the many different kinds of cancer, for instance) seems to be as prompt as ever. And of course the local medical practices, overworked and understaffed as they undoubtedly are, have had an on-going Covid pandemic to deal with. Meanwhile I smugly congratulate myself on my improving skills as a personal Home Carer for Vic while she is recuperating from her first operation , trying to learn by my many mistakes in cooking, laundry and all the other \u201cmenial\u201d duties which I had somehow managed to avoid in our previous pre-osteoarthritic life together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NHS \u2013 what\u2019s wrong with it? My excuse for not doing one of these \u201cblogs\u201d for many months is that we have been caught up in a medical emergency that has made any urge to write blogs, or even poetry, feel redundant – \u201cbeside the point\u201d somehow. No, not the international Covid Pandemic emergency, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-519","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":528,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions\/528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}