The state of the nation

Morning one and all

  I had intended to simply bore you further with comments about my brilliant book have you heard  its called Dead Men Lie.

Instead i am on a crusade. A thing I rarely become involved in but i experienced a lapse which must be exposed.

 As some of you will know my good lady wife is in hospital for a knee replacement. because of this i have witnessed the failing of those who work for this institution at first hand. What is evident immediately is that the concept while, creaking under the weight of work, is old the institution still works. The Government has poured no end of money into buildings new practices and state of the art machines but have failed to strike at the very fundamentals of the health service the staff. While most are diligent and hard working their is an underlying profusion of surely and uncaring staff which undermine everything that is being tried to update the service.  

Example:- The night after her operation the wife was approached by a nurse who obviously had lost her caring gene. She spoke as if talking to a child despite my wife being corpus mantis and articulate. Obviously this nurse had failed to read my wife's notes otherwise she would have been aware that my wife cannot have injections into her abdomen due to the major surgery she has undergone in that area. but no this nurse was adamant that "hospital protocol says this is where this injection goes so it was going to be administered."
 Protocols are written by fools for the guidance of idiots, a certain amount of flexibility has to be added to any protocol due to the very nature of a hospitals work. No two patients are the same what is good for 99, while have an adverse affect on the hundredth and that is where the caring side of a nurse must come in to care for that odd one percent of patients. If not then as now they receive undue publicity and lack of respect.

Example. My wife's surgeon( who I must say was great) said that pain relieve would be administered as and when needed.Untrue as soon as my wife was back on the ward time restrictions applied. Now i understand all about overdosing and the fact that medication is dangerous but when a patient is writhing in agony where is the compassion from the nursing staff? instead while the wife frantically rung her bell evidently the nurses were gathered at their station ignoring her calls by the way at the time she was unable to walk and in a side ward.    

Example. Now here is the doozy of this cataloug of disgrace. Last evening i was there when a doctor entered her room he didn't introduce himself simply stood and looked at the wife and the other woman patient. I actually asked him who he was. was he some perv there to spy on women.  I didn't know, obviously common decency and an introduction is something of the past. The stupidity of all this culminated when a nurse said that the wife couldn't have any more pain relieve because the hospital had no severodol. WHAT this is a major trauma unit and the pharmacy couldn't supply a morphine substitute. Instead i had to travel back home and get her supply then return with her own medication just so she could have pain relieve. You wouldn't get that sort of treatment in a third world country.

 There is far more to this saga but i sound a bore now needless to say this will be sent to the head of the hospital trust and a copy to the health minister if i do not receive some sort of apology then the papers will be my next port of call. What i would like to know does anyone else have similar stories? I bet you do. Perhaps i should write a book but of course no one would believe it if i did.
More soon D