Waiting Lists

When I was young I was very impatient. I was a person of lists & priorities. I was very organised & believed that I could do things better than anyone else. How self confident, how arrogant. But it did get me to the top of my profession. I wasn't good at waiting though, even in supermarket queues. I made decisions & took action quickly. So I imagine some things could have been done better & mistakes were made. 

Now I am much more patient & tolerant. I have learned not to expect things to be done yesterday. Just as well because that isn't how today's society works. I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time waiting for people to rectify their mistakes. Mistakes that frequently should not have happened in the first place. I could give you a list, but it would be very boring. But I resent the amount of my time it takes & I still naively have expectations that people will do their job properly.

The whole concept of a "waiting list" in healthcare seems to me to be unacceptable. Yes I know that the NHS need ever increasing amounts of money to meet today's needs. I also know that we need more medics & more hospital beds. Health & social care are inextricably linked so we need to sort that out too. However those problems have not appeared overnight. They are the result of decades of mismanagement, lack of effective communication & sharing of good practice, a hierarchy of fiefdoms that don't look at the patient holistically.....It's a behemoth & won't be sorted anytime soon. Especially as we are effectively bankrupt & there hasn't been the political will.

A waiting list sounds innocuous, but it isn't. A waiting list means patients trying to live with ill health, pain, fatigue & disability at home. It means patients gradually getting worse even past the point of recovery. It means family, friends even neighbours trying to care for someone who need professional care. Some will die.

 

Two personal examples, fortunately not life threatening. 

Last year I tore a tendon in my right hand. (I am right handed & live alone). It was excruciatingly painful. I couldn't move it or do anything with it & was terrified someone would bump into me. I was referred urgently to the "hand clinic". By the time the appointment finally came, months later, this year, my hand had recovered on it's own. I was told that "hand clinics" are the busiest orthopaedic clinics & routinely have very long wait lists. 

This year I have had bilateral Trochanteric Bursitis in my hips. The flare up of pain, fatigue & disability at it's acute worst meant I crawled upstairs on hands & feet, could not walk the 5 -10 minutes to my local shopping centre, could not stand for any length of time to prepare food & couldn't sit down & get up from a chair or turn over in bed without real pain. At it's mildest I am still very limited but it's bearable. Although the consultant put me on a cancellation list for ultrasound guided steroid injections into both hips, I know there is a 6 - 8 months waiting list.

I'm not going to die from any of this. I'm resilient & I can cope. My point is that although I am not in the worst waiting list situation, I do think this is unacceptable. And it is largely hidden. Because people on waiting lists have no choice, but to cope. 

Unless they can pay & that is against my principles.