Nursing Care In Hospital
It is being reported, that nurses are calling for more compassionate care in hospital.
I’m 65 and last year I collapsed and ended up in hospital. It was a teaching hospital and the doctor asked if I wouldn’t mind being used for interviewing practice by medical students.
It made a miserable time, almost enjoyable! Especially, as some students were attractive female ones.
Do other hospitals encourage their medical and nursing students to do this? It certainly, is a good way to get them up to speed in an important and perhaps neglected part of their training.
Hip Transplants At Wigan
The BBC is running a story about the first hip transplants at Wrightington Hospital near Wigan in the 1960s. There’s a lot more in the Wikipedia entry for John Charnley, the surgeon who led the pioneering work.
At Liverpool University in the 1960s, I was in digs at Huyton. My landlord’s daughter, Sheila Vaughan, was one of the nursing sisters at the hospital and told us about the work there.
Sheila had been a very good golfer, who’d played in the Curtis Cup.
Politicians interfere Too Much In Health Care
Not me that said that, but the view of Dame Ruth Carnall in this article about stroke care in London. This is an extract.
She went on to criticise politicians for interfering too much in health changes.
She said: “Politicians too often reduce complex medical arguments to soundbites.
“Compromise is a mistake but is hard to resist. There is a political aversion to major changes as we’ve seen with the debate over A&Es.”
But then politicians love to interfere and the sooner we get more politicians who are caring people first and politicians second, the better.
The trouble with healthcare is that for serious problems, there just isn’t the money to have super-duper unit for that problem at every hospital. So especially in places like London, cutting the number of units for each speciality is a good thing.
I would also say do we want to go back to the 1950s and 1960s, where there were loads of local general hospitals, which did everything and usually did it in a less than perfect way. I can’t remember anyone in those days, who was totally pleased with the service they got from the local hospitals in Barnet and Enfield. I, myself, have a gammy arm, which may well have been caused by substandard treatment when it was broken by the school bully.
Surely, the wonderful outcome of the Fabrice Muamba case, should be a lesson to everybody. He was probably saved by the absolutely top-class emergency treatment he revived on the pitch by a cardiologist who happened to be in the crowd and a swift removal to a cardiac hospital.
According to Dame Ruth, London now has eight major stroke units and the political delays cost seven hundred lives.
Hospital Food
I’ve had a bit of that in the last few years and as a coeliac, it’s general been rather poor.
But perhaps I was lucky compared to the lady with coeliac disease in this story. This is an extract.
When she was in hospital a few years ago, she was shocked by the food she was served.
“I was offered toast, but I can’t eat that. I need gluten-free bread. They didn’t have the porridge oats which I can eat, so I ended up with a boiled egg.”
And the subsequent meals did not improve either, despite the fact Kathleen had confirmed she was coeliac when she was first admitted.
“Lunch was fish fingers, which I couldn’t eat because of the breadcrumbs. They asked me why I couldn’t just pick them off.
“At dinner time they put gravy on my dinner and a Yorkshire pudding on the plate too. Because of the contamination risk, I couldn’t eat any of it.”
A friend, who used to work in a hospital always said that the most likely place to get ill, is a hospital.
Homerton Hospital
I’d never been to Homerton Hospital until this morning, although I did have my vasectomy in a private capacity at the old Hackney Hospital.
Today though, I needed my INR to be tested, as I’m changing doctors.
My main reaction was that I was pleasantly surprised and how professional they were. I was on the train to Stratford and Eastfield, forty-five minutes after arriving at the hospital.
The INR result was what it should be too!
A Thought About Coeliac Disease
After reading yet again, about a coeliac in hospital, where they really weren’t too professional about what he could eat, I’ve had this thought.
Is coeliac disease the most common disease, that can be cured by diet alone?
To take this further, am I right to think, that this fact gets up the average medic’s craw, as it means the disease can’t be cured by the two most common treatment methods; drugs or surgery?
Lifts and Crossing The Road At Euston Square Station
I had to go to University College Hospital this morning and took a train to Euston Square station.
The new lifts from the westbound platform to street level aren’t as well signposted as they should be and I met a young lady, who had got rather harassed trying to get to the street.
Coming back, I wanted to get a 30 bus to either Islington or home, so I decided that the quickest way was to take a train to Kings Cross and get the bus from there. I got to the stop just before one arrived.
Public transport from the hospital isn’t as good eastbound as it might be.
Why Not A Standard Hospital Chart?
I’ve been presenting information by computer for forty years and before that my father was a printer, who designed forms for companies for probably fifty years. So to say I have a lot of experience both in my brain and having been taught by several masters, I was surprised when I saw this item about hospital charts, I was initially surprised that it wasn’t already happening.
On the other hand though, when was healthcare anywhere in the world logical?
Every hospital chart and report on a world-wide scale should be the same, so let’s say like I did you go to hospital after an attack in Italy, your GP or British doctor can get a hang of what happened and what drugs you got. So in my case it would have been in Italian, but because everything would be in the same place, a doctor could get the gist of it.
But of course, it would remove the independence of a doctor to do what he or she wanted.
Torch Chasing In East London – Royal London Hospital
My granddaughter was born in the Royal London Hospital. So I had to go along and take some pictures.
The hospital now has been almost completely reconstructed and the famous facade is in the process of being refurbished. Note how in the distance in many of these pictures you can see The Gherkin.
A Hospital Trust Goes Bust
It has been reported that an NHS Trust has gone bust.
I have a heart problem and attend The Heart Hospital, which is part of the University College London Hospitals Trust.
It was built as a private hospital and went bust. UCLH then stepped in to clean up the mess and bought a bargain.
I suspect that anything worth saving from the South London Healthcare NHS Trust will be saved, at little inconvenience to patients. Hopefully, the managers, accountants, politicians and bankers who created the mess, will get their proper rewards.
The Anonymous Widower 