Nobody should have to work in this crumbling slum of a hospital
If you want to know what’s wrong with our sainted National Health Service, take a walk down Praed Street in Paddington, West London, and turn right into St Mary’s Hospital.
What you find there will shock you. The part I visited last week is almost a slum. Brickwork is crumbling. Pipes leak water destructively. The place is a warren of murky passages that join together a patchwork of separate buildings.
Inside, it is clean and orderly, as you would expect of a hospital, but dark and gloomy. Little, if any, light penetrates from outside. It is Dickensian and depressing.
Staff have the beaten-down look of people who are just trying to get through the day. They walk slowly and without purpose, shoulders hunched; they speak to one another in a monotone.
They are demoralized, and who would not be, working in such a place? Rachel Reeves’s £22.6 million cash injection will not change that any time soon.
But in their dealings with patients, they behave with impeccable professionalism. I was there for an echocardiogram (ECG), which uses ultrasound to construct a picture of the heart.
The young woman who carried out the procedure announced straight away: “I’m a student but someone qualified will come and check on my work before you go.”
As she worked, I learnt that she has completed a year of her 18-month course. She told me she enjoyed the work.
Before I left I asked a man in blue scrubs the way to the toilet. He began to give me directions, then shook his head, grinned and showed me where to go. We rounded a couple of corners, trudged along some shabby corridors in this benighted labyrinth and he tried again.
“Now, right here, then first left and through the first door…” He tailed off and just led the way, finally smiling patiently and pointing to the door of the patients’ lavatory.
No one should have to work in a place like this. I foresee a time when our enormous tax contributions to fund the NHS will simply pay for the upkeep of the rotting infrastructure and any treatment we require will be extra, probably funded by a private insurance scheme.
Something has to change. Even Tony Blair’s former Health Secretary, Alan Milburn concedes that. The NHS is “drinking in the last chance saloon,” he told The Times.
Milburn, now a key adviser to the new Health Secretary Wes Streeting, said people had to “stop thinking that the answer to the NHS problem is simply more and more money”.
He added: “It’s got to recognise that if you’re going to do big dollops of resources, then that has got to be matched by a massive dose of reform.”
Start with waste: All those people who miss GP and hospital appointments; the consultants who are being paid £200,000 a year in overtime to get the waiting lists down; the 2,800,000 who are off work with “long-term sickness”.
No more indulgence. This is no longer a rich country and we cannot afford to behave like one.
*****
A sports story in The Times caught my eye the other day. It was by Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent, and Martyn Ziegler, Chief Sports Reporter.
Does anyone know the difference? Is there a hierarchy? Is Lawton senior to Ziegler? The Times also has a Chief Sports Writer, Owen Slot, who before his elevation was the Chief Rugby Correspondent (and a very good one too). Where does he rank?
Ah, bylines… all part of the cut and thrust of office politics. Talented and ambitious people jostling for position want to signal their value and have something special to put on their CVs.
I once had to restrain a journalist from styling themself Acting Political Editor. I tried to explain that this was not a job title but a state of affairs: The Political Editor was ill and the person concerned was her deputy.
Of course the journalist was acting political editor. But that’s not a job, it’s just life.
Editors have long used job titles to placate the sharp-elbowed members of their staff. “More money? Sorry, things are a bit tight. But look, I can make you Royal Editor instead of Royal Reporter. How does that sound?”
The Sunday Express had a Royal Editor. But there was no one else in the department. So explain to me: What’s to edit?
Long ago on the Daily Express, the stars of the sports desk used to have it stipulated in their contracts that they would go on a minimum number of foreign assignments each year: The World Cup, European Cup, Olympics, Formula One.
This was mostly for the benefit of their egos and expense accounts but also to build up a cuttings book with exotic bylines: From Jock Strapp in Rio/Milan/Gstaad/Monte Carlo.
Almost all young journalists have come across the byline bandit. He’s the guy, often in a position of authority, who under the guise of pulling together various strands of a story, simply steals yours and puts his name on it.
Resistance is futile. But the imaginative among us – and we’re journalists, after all – can usually find a way to achieve a satisfying payback.
*****
France’s President Macron is ridiculed online for “trolling” the new President-elect of the United States in his message of congratulation.
He tells The Donald: “Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine…”
The Twitterati were in uproar. But a Macron aide insisted the reference to “convictions” merely meant Trump’s beliefs and not his felony rap.
Really? Macron is an arrogant and narcissistic man, an uber liberal who I suspect finds Trump revolting – and it would not surprise me if he meant exactly what he said.
*****
The Prime Minister is off to Azerbaijan this week to join the other climate change zealots at Cop29, the talking shop that aims to break our dependence on fossil fuels.
He will tell them that Britain still wants to decarbonise its economy swiftly because it is in our interests to pursue green policies and move us towards energy independence.
The trouble is, the people who matter won’t be there. President Joe Biden will be absent, so will France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Olaf Scholz and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Worse, the leaders of China and India, two of the world’s biggest polluters, are staying away. Could it have something to do with the setting? Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is no Paris.
The smaller countries who are there are calling for $1 trillion – that’s a thousand billion dollars – from the West to help to decarbonise their economies. The UK thinks that’s about right.
Good intentions. But if you want to know how those can set us on the path to penury, consider that the bill for a bat cave in Buckinghamshire woodland near the HS2 high-speed rail line has topped £100 million.
It is meant to protect a colony of Bechstein’s bats but HS2 chairman Sir Jon Thompson claims there is no evidence they are at risk from the trains passing their habitat.
But he had to build it because he needed a licence from Natural England. However, Buckinghamshire County Council turned down the plan for the “eyesore” and he had to set lawyers and experts on them at a cost of hundreds of thousands.
This country doesn’t deserve to be rich when we fritter away our taxes placating eco-zealots and indulging obstructive planners.
Then we are told that floods that killed more than 200 in Eastern Spain, with many more still missing, might have been averted if a planned dam to divert the rains had been built. There was not enough money for it.
Under pressure from green groups, the Spanish government has been destroying dams in line with EU wishes. Zealots again. It is time we stopped the self-flagellation.
*****
I got into an unseemly slanging match at the weekend… with my watch.
It is one of those Apple ones, with a virtual assistant, Siri, and I must have accidentally pressed something.
It’s always happening. Each incoming text message arrives on the watch with a few optional replies and sometimes my fat-fingered attempts to dismiss them result in me sending one by mistake.
This can lead to inappropriate exchanges.
“I’ve just fallen down the stairs.”
“Yay!”
But back to the spat.
I’m sitting having a conversation with Madame when Siri suddenly pipes up: “Hey, Richard, how can I help?”
“Damn thing’s talking to me,” I say and try to continue with my conversation.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” the watch says.
“Oh, just piss off,” I reply.
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” says Siri.
I become aware of a slight commotion and look up. Madame is practically weeping tears of laughter as she taps gleefully on her phone.
She is reeling off bite-sized text messages to the family, the way experts do. They are punctuated with smiling emojis and I hear the ping of ha-ha replies.
“Your father’s having a row with his watch…”
“The watch is winning…”
“Silly old fool.”
Slightly harsh. I thought I was giving it a run for its money.
*****
“I was watching the London marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. And I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.” — Micky Flanagan
RICHARD DISMORE
12 November 2024
