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12 months ago this very day I was drinking copious amounts of water to replace blood loss from a triple heart bypass. What a wonderful thing the human body is and how well it recovers from trauma. I am not back to peak fitness yet but I'm getting there. As the warmer weather arrives I hope to be doing more and more cycling but mostly in recent months I've been jogging, and stopping when I get tired. It's not Usain Bolt but I can manage a hundred yards in about 20 seconds, which is not bad for a 67 year old.
What this post is about is our NHS. It is the best in the world. The BBC and other MSM outlets dish out the opprobrium whenever there is a problem with the NHS. So for the past few weeks we have been hearing about problems with Stafford General Hospital, and the media have dragged this story out ad nauseum. It only needs one blip at one hospital and they make it sound like the NHS overall is in terminal decline. That is what they want us to think so they can get private companies creaming off one of the success stories of the last century, one of the success stories of socialism.
Privatisation attracts doctors and nurses, whose first priority is how much they can earn. Then there are shareholders to pay all of which helps push up the cost of healthcare so that ordinary people who cannot afford insurance cannot afford to be ill. No services are ever better in private hands. You only have to look at Gas, Electricity and Water and the way year on year costs escalate to pay the greedy shareholders out of stagnant wages. Privatisation of the NHS is coming unless we all do something to oppose private healthcare when it replaces NHS services. Make sure they never take away a pillar of society once described as the 'best in the world'.
The NHS has never been safe in Tory hands, but since the Labour Party (New Labour) was turned into another rich person's party it is not safe in their hands either. Be proud of the NHS. It is there for all of us. Fight for it!
Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Friday, February 17, 2012
Hospital computers
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Hospedia supplies computers to this hospital and most of the hospitals in the West Midlands. I've had one of their systems' personnel out twice and even she could not get the touch screen to function properly. If an advert appears there is no way to close it down which means you have to return to the main menu and start again, losing anything that might be open. When I get out I intend to complain about the poor system. It is most annoying because the service is not cheap.
Another of the system's shortcomings is a message box which pops up pretending you have a genuine message, or messages. This is just another way of locking the screen because if you go into it you cannot get out and any tabs you may have open are lost forever, including any work.
So I'm reduced to using my phone, the touch-screen of which is much better, though not perfect. This means I'm going to be largely incommunicado for however long it takes before the operation.
Another of the system's shortcomings is a message box which pops up pretending you have a genuine message, or messages. This is just another way of locking the screen because if you go into it you cannot get out and any tabs you may have open are lost forever, including any work.
So I'm reduced to using my phone, the touch-screen of which is much better, though not perfect. This means I'm going to be largely incommunicado for however long it takes before the operation.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Only when I laugh (2)
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After my near-sleepless night on the admission ward, and following some 17 hours observation, I was moved to a more general ward. All protestations to take my daily 2 hour walk fell on stony ground. The dogs must be really missing me - at least I tell myself that. But the truth is they are still being walked, just not by me, and for dogs I suspect loyalty is only as faithful as the next walk. So here I am, relaxing and pontificating, with my body getting used to a miscellany of drugs, most of the ones I binned more than eight years ago.
Apart from a student-nurse waking me up to see if I was breathing (so much for those who think I snore) things have gone quite well and I am settling in to a new regime, sleeping well (too well) and anticipating a significant wait before the operation, if other inmates' experiences are anything to go by. Despite rumours there is no escape plan. People are free to come and go, including visitors. Our NHS is great, doctors and nurses, and other staff. So what's the problem?
Over my bed is a television screen, a facility provided by private enterprise (as can be deduced by the cost to use it). Although I do not watch much television I thought this might be a useful means of keeping in touch with the outside world since it has a built-in touch-screen internet link and a telephone which is free for outgoing calls to home numbers, but 50p per minute for incoming calls from private lines. So I paid for £25-00 of usage (5 days). This would not have been unreasonable if the touch-screen worked properly. Instead it has a mind of its own and I have already lost a substantial amount of blog-text because of its peculiarities.
It is worse than just being inefficient and slow. The slider-bar which moves the screen up and down is temperamental and very often does not work at all. What's more it is close to the advert thumbnail and guess what! It is not unusual for an advert to fill the screen when you try to move the slider-bar. Most of these adverts are for internet providers, probably advertising on the basis that their services are better, and cheaper, than the hospital facilities; and whatever you do there is no way of avoiding having to look at these adverts. For example, if you try to close the advert thumbnail, with the close ad tab, this opens it up. Worst of all, once an advert is open it cannot be closed. Similarly when you press one of the on-screen keyboard keys you can never be quite sure what letter will appear. It may be the letter you press or the one next to it, either side, or the one above or below. But it doesn't matter how incomprehensible is the text you are working on because once the advert is up it remains up until you hit the return to MAIN MENU tab which, of course, closes everything down. There appear to be no alternatives, for example, the on-screen keyboard has no control keys, so the user is stumped.
Naturally I complained first thing Monday morning, and laid it on thick about sick people having to struggle with unworkable hardware for which they had paid over the going rate. When I added that I was sure she had heard all this before, she said she hadn't. From that I inferred that she had either been told to say that, or that patients do not complain. Having no reason to mistrust her I later asked the man in the next bed, Paul, if he had struggled with the touch-screen. He had, but he had not complained. Anyway, tomorrow the maintenance man for this company will be here, and, poor man, will have to hear the complaints all over again. You get what you pay for used to be the maxim.
Apart from a student-nurse waking me up to see if I was breathing (so much for those who think I snore) things have gone quite well and I am settling in to a new regime, sleeping well (too well) and anticipating a significant wait before the operation, if other inmates' experiences are anything to go by. Despite rumours there is no escape plan. People are free to come and go, including visitors. Our NHS is great, doctors and nurses, and other staff. So what's the problem?
Over my bed is a television screen, a facility provided by private enterprise (as can be deduced by the cost to use it). Although I do not watch much television I thought this might be a useful means of keeping in touch with the outside world since it has a built-in touch-screen internet link and a telephone which is free for outgoing calls to home numbers, but 50p per minute for incoming calls from private lines. So I paid for £25-00 of usage (5 days). This would not have been unreasonable if the touch-screen worked properly. Instead it has a mind of its own and I have already lost a substantial amount of blog-text because of its peculiarities.
It is worse than just being inefficient and slow. The slider-bar which moves the screen up and down is temperamental and very often does not work at all. What's more it is close to the advert thumbnail and guess what! It is not unusual for an advert to fill the screen when you try to move the slider-bar. Most of these adverts are for internet providers, probably advertising on the basis that their services are better, and cheaper, than the hospital facilities; and whatever you do there is no way of avoiding having to look at these adverts. For example, if you try to close the advert thumbnail, with the close ad tab, this opens it up. Worst of all, once an advert is open it cannot be closed. Similarly when you press one of the on-screen keyboard keys you can never be quite sure what letter will appear. It may be the letter you press or the one next to it, either side, or the one above or below. But it doesn't matter how incomprehensible is the text you are working on because once the advert is up it remains up until you hit the return to MAIN MENU tab which, of course, closes everything down. There appear to be no alternatives, for example, the on-screen keyboard has no control keys, so the user is stumped.
Naturally I complained first thing Monday morning, and laid it on thick about sick people having to struggle with unworkable hardware for which they had paid over the going rate. When I added that I was sure she had heard all this before, she said she hadn't. From that I inferred that she had either been told to say that, or that patients do not complain. Having no reason to mistrust her I later asked the man in the next bed, Paul, if he had struggled with the touch-screen. He had, but he had not complained. Anyway, tomorrow the maintenance man for this company will be here, and, poor man, will have to hear the complaints all over again. You get what you pay for used to be the maxim.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Only when I laugh (1)
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It's not funny. I'm in hospital. Having come to do a routine test on Tuesday I ended up being admitted. The test was at 10.00 a.m. but there was a long wait before the bed was available at midnight. Following a sleep-deprived night before test, and partly because of it, I was exhausted and really looking forward to a good night's sleep. First of all I was fitted with some stick-on extra nipples which made me look like a great Hampshire sow, then I was linked to a heart-monitoring machine like a Friesian milker. After the machine was switched on there was a regular bleep, with its echo, at two-second intervals like the sound of ping-pong games in the early days of personal computers. This would last all night.
On its own this was a novel experience, but the man in the bed opposite, was something else, poor chap. Whatever his problems - and weight was one of them - they were of a very serious nature, which meant he needed regular attention, from dedicated staff who are a credit to the NHS. Just because some people are worse off than yourself doesn't make your own lack of sleep any more bearable; and at least the man opposite was sleeping even if it was not a peaceful sleep. With every breath he emitted an unspeakable noise which was a kind of pained snore, impossible to translate. Sleeping was something the staff, for some reason, did not want for him, or for me I felt, so they kept coming and waking him up. As soon as they had finished with him he was back into his impossible to translate snore pattern. By 4 a.m. I had not had a wink of sleep. Every time I felt I might shut out the ping-pong repetition and nod off something happened to make sure I didn't. A female patient who had been admitted that day was disorientated and screaming at the nurses, and, I learnt later, was hitting the staff with a walking stick. By the time security and staff had sorted things out it was 5 a.m. Some time between then and 6.30 a.m. - when they woke everybody up - I fell asleep.
After a wash I enquired of the man in the bed next to me:
"What time is breakfast?"
"I'm a little mutton Jeff."
"WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?"
"The doctor's not been down yet!"
"Thanks."
On its own this was a novel experience, but the man in the bed opposite, was something else, poor chap. Whatever his problems - and weight was one of them - they were of a very serious nature, which meant he needed regular attention, from dedicated staff who are a credit to the NHS. Just because some people are worse off than yourself doesn't make your own lack of sleep any more bearable; and at least the man opposite was sleeping even if it was not a peaceful sleep. With every breath he emitted an unspeakable noise which was a kind of pained snore, impossible to translate. Sleeping was something the staff, for some reason, did not want for him, or for me I felt, so they kept coming and waking him up. As soon as they had finished with him he was back into his impossible to translate snore pattern. By 4 a.m. I had not had a wink of sleep. Every time I felt I might shut out the ping-pong repetition and nod off something happened to make sure I didn't. A female patient who had been admitted that day was disorientated and screaming at the nurses, and, I learnt later, was hitting the staff with a walking stick. By the time security and staff had sorted things out it was 5 a.m. Some time between then and 6.30 a.m. - when they woke everybody up - I fell asleep.
After a wash I enquired of the man in the bed next to me:
"What time is breakfast?"
"I'm a little mutton Jeff."
"WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?"
"The doctor's not been down yet!"
"Thanks."
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