In the news reports we are told that in several hospitals nurses are given tabards to wear instructing patients and others that they are not to talk to them or interrupt them in their primary duty of shoving pills down throats.
Tabards are a very medieval form of dress. Increasingly the NHS is becoming more and more medieval in its approach to the general population, sorry, customer base.
The highly structured hierarchy of control, the extent of security services, the rigorous segregation of duties and functions, the number of plagues carrying off the unlucky, starvation, lack of clean water, general filth and primitive manners are taking us back to the past.
Add to this the whole service is now more a means of extracting money for predatory war lords of the financial and consultancy classes than it is of actually curing the sick or caring for the infirm.
It is only a matter of time before new management initiatives more related to the past medieval forms of contact will be introduced.
The one pictured above will surely be one of the first.
"Leeches" is a word that springs to my mind.
ReplyDeleteSPEAKING AS I FIND
ReplyDeleteI recently went into the Royal Hospital at Derby for a minor sinus operation. I can report that the treatment was excellent in every respect.
From receptionist to surgeon, anaesthetist and their team through to care on the ward, I could not have been treated better. The staff all combined kindliness with efficiency and, although they had many boxes to tick, they never made me feel like one. When people know how to treat you, it fills you with confidence about the surgery and technical side. I do not think I could have received better treatment or have been treated more promptly by going private.
I guess that much of the NHS is excellent and most of it good. The trouble is that, if you are unlucky and hit on a bad patch, you are up against the brute power of a monopoly.