just a form of slow suicide.
I Wouldn’t Trust Them with My Dog
I have another example of why I don’t think that the free-market system is particularly good for the health service, or at least not good for the patients who use it.
I was working in another area a little while ago, and while there got sent to a private nursing home. The patient was given to us as ‘80-year-old female with difficulty in breathing’. We arrived and saw what looked to be two nurses having an animated discussion in the main foyer.
Grabbing our equipment we followed one of the nurses into the depths of the home, and were shown to the patient’s room.
The patient was very much dead.
Also in the room were four nurses. They were standing around and they weren’t doing CPR, they weren’t breathing for the patient. They looked at me for guidance.
I immediately switched into commanding mode. ‘Why isn’t anyone doing CPR?’ I asked.
‘We were,’ one of the nurses replied, ‘but I saw you coming in the mirror and stopped.’
The mirror was positioned so that if she had been doing CPR, she would have had to have eyes in the back of her head to see me coming.
When someone isn’t breathing you have to breathe for them—this is the ‘ambu-bag’ that TV doctors put over someone’s face and operate by squeezing it. It forces oxygen into your lungs. Unfortunately the patient had a normal oxygen mask on her, which would just bathe her face with oxygen, but it wouldn’t get it into the lungs where it needed to be.
The patient was also lying on an air mattress, which would have meant that any CPR which may have been done would have been ineffectual because you need the patient on something hard so you have something to push against.
I felt the jaw of the patient—rigor mortis had already set in, so there was no point in attempting to continue any resuscitation attempt.
Someone had tried to take the patient’s blood pressure, as there was still a BP cuff around her arm.
As is usual in these cases where we know or suspect that care has been—shall we say—lacking, we offer the services of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) to teach the nursing staff more effective resuscitation skills. However, they should have these skills anyway as qualified nurses. Talking to one of the people who teaches these courses, it seems that many of these nurses have forgotten how to do this. It’s free to them although I don’t think we get any extra money from the government to run it.
The nurse in charge, who was busy photocopying in the office while all this was happening, refused.
So, in a world of competition between privately owned care homes, it would seem that the care has not improved. Instead you get poorly skilled nurses, managed by staff who don’t want them to improve. This despite a number of suppliers who are all in competition with each other—it’s a lucrative market providing elderly care.
You’ve got to laugh when an ‘old salt’ police sergeant tells you that he’d like to meet the person who assaulted my patient…
…And shake their hand…
…And you agree with him even though you’ve only known the patient for 20 seconds.
The radio sparked into life, ‘General Broadcast, General Broadcast—are there any crews able to deal with a ceiling collapsed on a mother and her two-year-old child?’
We were just finishing up the paperwork on our previous job so we asked for it to be sent down to us. I was driving and we were soon at the house. From the outside everything looked normal.
However, inside the house it was pure chaos.
There were seven children running around the house, all of them under the age of twelve. A single mother was clutching her two-year-old to her chest. At first glance they looked unharmed. The mother seemed more frightened and angry than injured.
We soon got the full story: the mother and her child were having a nap in the bedroom when the ceiling had fallen on them. We entered the bedroom expecting a few scraps of plaster. Instead we were met with the sight of one-and-a-half-foot plaster and lath ceiling, a huge chunk of which had fallen six foot onto the bed.
The hole in the ceiling was about five feet in diameter; there was a lot of heavy debris spread across the bed and floor.
Rather understandably the woman was a bit upset—the individual pieces of plaster that had dropped on her were about the size of my hand and were over an inch thick. I couldn’t estimate the total weight of the plaster, but each lump was very heavy.
It was about now that the headache I’d thought I’d got rid of earlier in the evening started to return.
As a single parent who had just moved into the area she had no other relatives to help look after the children so she was refusing to go to hospital. My crewmate took her and the toddler into the ambulance so that he could examine her more fully. If he found nothing too serious then we could leave her at home to look after her children.
So off they went to the ambulance.
Which left me looking after six anklebiters.
I don’t like children.
While he was in the ambulance my crewmate phoned the patient’s GP and arranged for them to come and visit the patient. He then arranged for the police to turn up and give the patient some legal advice. Rather obviously the patient was a trifle annoyed at the landlord who had assured her that the house was fit to be lived in.
Meanwhile I was doing my best to entertain the children. My best wasn’t enough.
I was relieved when the children’s older brother arrived with some takeaway chicken meals. Yes—there were now eight children in the house of this 36-year-old woman. This older brother was more like a father to the others and he soon had these apparently feral children under control.
Luckily for the woman and her child our initial guess was correct—neither she nor her child was seriously injured.
My crewmate and I escaped from the scene as soon as the police arrived.
An ideal invention for the blogger in your family would be a pair of video-recording glasses—wear them all day, and should something interesting happen the wearer presses a button to save the last 30 seconds of video to a small storage device.
If that were possible I’d now be showing you a video of a lovely young man.
I was driving along on blue lights and sirens (to an ‘intoxicated—feeling unwell’) just heading past the Underground station when from the pavement I could hear someone shouting: ‘Wanker…Wanker…Wanker.’ He was also making the traditional hand gestures.
A quick look at him led me to believe that he was either homeless or an alcoholic, or both. I could see that he had no front teeth and he only looked around 30 years old.
I slowed the ambulance so that my crewmate and I could laugh loudly in his general direction.
He turned his back on us.
He bent over.
He