Thoughts of a carer

  (This was written before ‘Dancing Bloody Nurses’) *** For the fifth time in just over a month my partner, Viv, and I spent nearly an hour last Tuesday trying to arrange to chat with a GP. We had to subject ourselves to the dial, redial shenanigans at 8am, along with hundreds of others, and the local phone exchange was jammed - a daily event hereabouts. We persevered and got through after half an hour, before having to queue and wait, listen to recorded messages and be put on hold for another ten minutes or so. The reason for this was that Viv had had some hospital tests on Saturday, and, Tuesday being the first working day following that, we needed to chat to the GP to arrange next steps.  In any sensible healthcare system our family doctor would have called us anyway to discuss the results of hospital tests; in ‘our NHS’, you have to go through the 8am process of ritual humiliation first, then wait at home to be called. Soviet Russia was not the final bastion of obdurate administrat

  Much is said by our useless political leaders that we should be more productive. They tell us that the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’; either they are deluded or they are trying to manipulate us.  *** Around the beginning of March Viv started to experience pain and discomfort when swallowing. Initially she thought it might be a sore throat type virus; swallowing issues being a complication with one of the conditions that Viv has, I mentioned it to a support nurse at one of the hospitals supporting Viv, who suggested we should contact the GP. That would have involved the ritual of the 8am humiliation by telephone; we decided to put this off for a week or two to see if the problem went away. Viv saw a dentist in mid-March, to whom we mentioned the problem. She couldn’t see any problem, and also suggested contacting the GP. To engage with a GP these days involves careful management of one’s diary: you have put aside an hour or so to call starting at 8, then be available for them to ring