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 Waiting Room
Medical mishaps reported each week by our covert correspondent, Jackie Marshall, who works at the coalface of modern medicine - the waiting room at a National Health Service (NHS) clinic. (Why not catch up on Jackie's most recent trials and tribulations.)
The Seven Deadly Sins Of The National Health Service
November 27, 2006
Take this test: grab a piece of paper. Write down the seven deadly sins. Do it as fast as you can. Don't read on until you've done it.
Done? Good. You got to five without too much trouble, didn't you? Even six. But I'll bet you the last one took you almost as long to remember as it took you to get all of the others together. Well, take note, honey, 'cause that's the character flaw you're most likely to suffer from - sloth.
Why am I talking about sloth? Because health authorities in the UK have announced that they may refuse operations to smokers, the fat and others who have made UNSOUND LIFESTYLE CHOICES.
There are sound clinical reasons for being cautious about operating on someone who's so fat their blood-pressure is sky high, or who smokes so much that their circulation puts them at risk of blood clots; but phrases such as "self-inflicted" and "lifestyle choice" should start ringing alarm bells.
The trouble is, morality is a moveable feast. After all, it's not that long since pregnant women were advised to have a cig and a glass of stout if their nerves were playing up, and there was a time when those getting it on with their fellow soldiers were put in front of the firing squad, rather than into married quarters. And if we start getting the thin end of the moral wedge into the suppurating morass of healthcare provision, it's going to be open season.
You can hardly refuse people treatment on self-inflicted grounds, after all, and carry on pumping out the stomachs of attempted suicides, can you? You can't get much more self-inflicted than that, can you? And how about knee-replacements for joggers? Someone who broke their back while foxhunting? That seventeen-year-old binge-drinker with the bottle-glass in his eye?
But why should we just apply the sins to the individual? Why not apply them to all the organizations in the healthcare industry.
- Greed - pharmaceutical companies which charge unreasonable prices for life-saving drugs. And I'm not only taking about third-worlders dying of AIDS, here: the UK is known as "Treasure Island" among drug companies because of the grossly inflated prices they seem to get away with charging our taxpayers.
- Envy - Yeah, I know you keep seeing your fellow-doctors driving new Mercs to the golf course, but that doesn't mean you should be charging a full-time salary for working a twenty-hour week so you've got time to fit in all those high-rolling private patients; in NHS operating theatres!
- Covetousness - Many hospital administrators are paid by bonuses, the "results" they're bonused on being money-saving. Which means using cleaning contractors who don't know the meaning of "antiseptic" because they gave the lowest quote, junior doctors on 72-hour-straight shifts, massive management consultancy bills and entire wards being closed for being too efficient, performing too many procedures and therefore being too expensive.
- Wrath - As evinced by talk of self-inflicted-ness etc. We're stupid, illogical, thrill-seeking primates, for God's sake, not moral super-beings. Nobody ever said we were rational, not even God.
- Pride - What with the competition to get into Medical Schools, the primary personality trait endemic among doctors is their ability to pass exams. Many of them forget that this does not necessarily make people who didn't go to medical school lesser human beings.
- Lust - Well. Most hospitals have a bar for medical staff buried somewhere in the adminny/morguey/changing-roomy bits (I had a boyfriend who ran one of them), and things go on in them that would make Hogarth blush. But then again, something's got to get them through those 72-hour shifts.
- Sloth - Seriously. See covetousness, and greed, above. If only some of those administrators would pull their fingers out and do some ferocious bargaining, they'd earn their bonuses back in no time.
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
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