Rude Health

Five million euro for a hospital bed will not be possible after this viral pandemic, says Maurice Gueret, who nearly had a close shave disguised as Miley from ‘Glenroe’

Maurice Gueret recalls playing Miley from Glenroe...

Army builders Extraordinary tales of speed-building have emerged during the coronavirus crisis, with national armies the heroes. In 10 days, China had a two-storey facility in Wuhan, catering for 1,000 patients with 30 intensive-care units. Britain was watching and promptly kitted out its NHS Nightingale facility in east London.

The physical building was already there in the form of a large convention centre. Its conversion to a 4,000-bed field hospital — led by a colonel who has built medical facilities in war zones around the world — took just a few weeks.

The trouble now, after Brexit, may be to find staff for it. One lesson the coronavirus may teach the UK is that ruling the waves without the camaraderie and goodwill of its neighbours is dangerous. I’m puzzled that Ireland is to pause building of its new €2bn-plus children’s hospital. But considering that planning for the facility began back in 1969, speed has never really been of the essence.

But perhaps it’s time that healthcare planners examined new ways of delivering healthcare facilities in a more timely and economic fashion. This world is going to be a very much poorer place once the coronavirus has had its wicked way. The profligate days when we spend almost ¤5m per bed on a new hospital facility will surely come to an end.

Glenroe snip

It’s April Fool’s Day as I write this column, but what I write below is neither spoof nor lie. I have been catching up on newspaper obituaries of the great Dr Jonathan Miller, who passed away at the tail end of last year. I hadn’t known that his first theatrical performance was in a medical student pantomime in the university city of Cambridge. That tradition of students putting on a comedy show for their seniors, often poking fun at professors, was shared at Trinity, where I finished up in the late 1980s. Our revue was held late one night in a theatre at St James’s Hospital, thankfully not of the operating variety. Being tall, thin, curly and gangly — not unlike Miller, in fact — the part chosen for me was to play Miley of Glenroe. In a sketch that was never shown in the TV series, Biddy had persuaded a reluctant Miley to accompany her to Clane where they would seek out the eminent Dr Rynne for a vasectomy. They arrived at the good doctor’s office to find it was empty. “Dr Rynne. Dr Rynne?” shouted Biddy. To which a grouchy Miley harrumphed: “Ah Jaysus, Biddy, can’t you see the doctor’s out? There’s no Dr Rynne in at all, at all!” I don’t recall much more of the sketch, except that

‘Dr Rynne’ did arrive, and wasn’t impressed by a nervy Miley smoking in his consulting room. Dr Rynne was played by a student who went on to become an eminent gynaecologist and hospital master. I’m sure he wanted to do the right thing for Biddy and put her out of marital misery.

Close shave

Michael has been in touch about my recent piece on the use of spiderwebs to stop bleeding. He tells me that he was born in a thatched house in the 1940s and remembers his late mother instructing everybody to leave cobwebs alone in case anyone got cut. There were no electronic toys for children in those days and Michael recalls them making their own play in local woods, bogs and unsurfaced roads. He recalls plenty of cuts, but strangely, despite his mother’s warning, she never actually used the cobwebs that she protected. Patrick in Cork has been in touch about the same thing. He recalls his father often looking for cobwebs to stop the blood flow whenever he nicked himself shaving. I’m not sure when cotton wool first arrived in Ireland, but it was certainly the quick remedy for shaving accidents in the 1960s. Spiders had, by then, become redundant. My own mother ran a mile from them.

Paper chase

Patrick also had a story to tell about our current ‘toilet roll famine’. He grew up in the war years, when improvisation was all the rage. He tells me that toilet paper only arrived in about 1954. In recent years, he was giving a heritage tour to about 50 people around his old school, part of which included a trip outside to the playground. The remains of an old urinal was still visible, and Patrick also showed them the toilet block. One of the visitors asked him where the boys could wash their hands afterwards and was shocked to hear that there was no such facility at the school. She was even more shocked to be told there was no toilet paper whatsoever. Clever lads would bring their own supplies of cut-up newspaper sheets from home for the necessary.