It’s 4am. When your heart arrests and the emergency call goes out, what you really don’t want is a doctor whose first response to your crisis is a silent stream of expletives. You don’t want the person racing to your bedside to be so exhausted they can barely think straight. And you definitely don’t want them to be pumping your chest while wondering what to do with the patient pile-up threatening to overrun the unit from where they’ve just sprinted.
I don’t want those things either – but I’ve been that doctor and I’ve been that callous. I don’t know a single one of us who hasn’t. There’s an ugly truth about the NHS frontline right now that health secretary Jeremy Hunt would dearly love to airbrush away. We, the doctors and nurses at the sharp end, increasingly feel we are bearing witness to its slow, relentless disintegration. Daily, we are fighting against a breaking system and though for us that may be soul-destroying, for our patients – in so many different ways – it is potentially life-threatening.
The government would have you believe that not only is the NHS flourishing, but that it is being safely steered on its way to becoming the world’s first “truly seven-day” health service – an all-singing, all-dancing bonanza of unprecedented weekend care. Without any new doctors for these new weekend services. Or extra nurses. Or extra resources, in fact, of any kind.
Full story in The Guardian 22 August 2016