Daft Old Duffer is back, a day late this week due to all at the VB office being in London for ‘March For The Alternative’ yesterday. Ed
I was discussing the dreaded National Health cuts with a pal, when he told me of an incident that happened when he spent a week in hospital recently, nursing some broken bones.
The ward he was in housed a dozen or so men, for the most part recuperating from some minor operation or other.
Special attention
One of the patients however, differed from the rest in that he lay entirely helpless, unable even to pick up a cup of water, or even to scratch his own nose, and needing to be turned every hour or so by a team of nurses just to prevent bed sores.
Naturally he received the lion share of the nurse’s attention. The nurses, who never for a second, displayed any impatience with his endless small demands, his frequent, feeble calls for help and his sometimes-natural petulance.
Until one day
At a time when the night shift was being replaced by the daytime staff, his plaintive calls were totally ignored for several minutes on end. The other patients waited with increasing concern for someone to respond. Until at last, my pal being nearest the door, hobbled out to investigate.
All the ward staff were gathered in the passageway, perhaps a dozen of them, lined up at a long reception counter, all furiously filling in forms; ticking boxes; writing notes; flicking pages as fast as they could go. The situation seemed immediately plain.
Flooded with paperwork
The nursing staff were so overwhelmed with routine paperwork, the only way they could hope to cope with it was to spend several minutes at the end and beginning of each shift totally neglecting their proper duty of caring for their patients.
And you can bet all this information recording and passing on was not for the benefit of the house doctors or the specialists, all of whom personally visited those under their care at regular intervals, clearly remembering the operations they had performed and knew the current condition of each individual. So he could only assume that the highly skilled and overworked staff were immersed in such essential matters as recording the number of towels used per shift and the amount of sheets left unused, how many bags of infected waste had been removed and what maintenance was required on what trolley.
All statistics so vital to the regular meetings conducted by the administration departments no doubt.
Ring-fencing of front line staff?
We have been repeatedly assured that the Health Service front line will be ring-fenced.
Sure it will – other than perhaps a couple of part time auxiliaries being quietly told their help will no longer be required. And no doubt any people axed, will be from the paper shuffling admin departments. But the paper shuffling itself won’t be cut, bet your life that will continue to be essential and will just have to be loaded on to the nurses to do in between caring for their patients.
Image: dreamingofariz under CC BY 2.0
