It’s 9pm on a drizzly Monday evening when my sister and I arrive at Lewisham A&E. The slightly fraught security guard is busy jostling a drunk man out of the waiting room as he informs me, we are third in the queue for seeing the doctor. I realise when I am called that he means the receptionist.
At this point, I am in so much pain that it’s difficult to swallow, let alone speak. This is not helpful for the A&E process. Luckily my sister is with me and can communicate on my behalf. We look up, waiting time is 4 hours…Not good. We brace ourselves for the night ahead.
But after only 1.5 hours my name is called, and I am seen by the nurse and then in quick succession the doctor who cannot understand a word of what I am saying: he calls me ‘Maria’ repeatedly. He quickly prods a lollipop stick in my throat whilst another nurse takes my bloods. After a confused process of being ushered into a patchwork of rooms around A&E, an Ear, Nose and Throat, specialist doctor comes to examine my throat, explaining that I will need to be put on an IV drip with antibiotics immediately before he operates that night.
We end up in a second waiting room, evoking some kind of purgatory, where the problem seemed to be communication. Patients were sat indefinitely without any indication of why they were there, how long they could be expected to be there, and who was responsible for them. A patient who had suffered a severe allergic reaction was so fed up with the hours of waiting for who knows what, that he resorted to self-discharging, a strategy I was strictly cautioned against by my medical student friend who I was keeping in the loop.
Luckily since my doctor had been so clear, my sister was able to remind the exhausted-looking nurse that I needed to be hooked onto my drip with meds before my imminent operation. The doctor came thirty minutes later and was clearly frustrated with how long it took for me to be given my drip. The operation all went smoothly, and I was delighted to feel instant changes, I could even utter a few clear words, but he informed me that I needed to stay the night, the quinsy throat was still going strong, and they needed to operate again tomorrow.
Getting a bed was another dilemma, after waiting for another half an hour, it was 1am and my sister, determined to sort out my bed, nudged one of the doctors who responded by saying that she had no idea I needed a bed and would get it sorted as soon as she could.
I was finally given a bed at 2.30am, where I spent the next four days. In the ensuing days every morning the nurses on the ward greeted me with smiles. These nurses, all of whom were immigrant women of colour, have relentless shifts extending into the night often attending to multiple patients requiring their attention.
Each day spent in hospital I went for a minor operation with an ENT specialist, I was reassured by her warmth, professionalism and efficiency. She has in tow a secondary school work experience student and a medical student who not-so-tactfully reminds me that I am lucky to be in hospital just days before the resident doctor strikes. The specialist is quick to reassure me that she will be on call during the strikes so there is no need to worry. I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic but each day I see her I swear she looks more tired than the last.
In fact, among the hospital staff I get a sense of patience wearing thin. A sense that the continual pressures and inherent stress of dealing with overflooding, under resourced wards, for twelve-hour shifts was catching up with everyone on the front-line.
When I finally make it to the discharge lounge, I can almost smell the clean air of freedom (as opposed to my less than pleasant smelling ward), but I am quickly reminded that this is the NHS so even getting people out of hospital is not straightforward. The lounge, a corner room in the back of the hospital, is in disarray, the one matron in charge does not know the names of the patients she’ll be discharging and the privately-contracted ‘deliverers’ inform me that the previous matron, who had excelled at this tail-end of hospital management, had recently quit due to the stress of the job.
Eventually I am let go, with antibiotics and discharge notes in tow, and left feeling that although the medical care I received was excellent and the front-line workers were making the best out of a bad situation, what was abundantly clear was, put these people into a better system and they would thrive. The institutional mismanagement, the lack of coordination between different units, doctors and nurses, and the latent clear overworking of front-line workers gives the impression of an NHS on its knees. Even with waiting lists falling and thousands more GPs across the country, there is still a long way to go for this Labour government to overhaul the NHS and get it moving in the right direction again.
