Matter of life or death
YOUNG patient Nazreen is in agony in a hospital bed, waiting to find out if her hip replacement surgery will finally go ahead. The 23-year-old, who is severely disabled after a stroke as a child, has waited for nearly a year.
“It’s heartbreaking, I feel so helpless,” says her mother. But the op may be cancelled. Richard King, consultant orthopedic surgeon, says: “She’s in agony, but how can we do her operation and cancel the patient with a brain tumour or the one whose heart’s giving up?
“That’s the problem. It’s ruining her life but it’s not going to end her life. This is what we’re facing every day.”
A year spent reacting to the pandemic has left nearly five million people waiting for treatment in
England alone. At the University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire Trust hospitals, there are tough scenes as doctors are forced to make impossible decisions.
A receptionist works her way through 10 pages of patients on a waiting list for one consultant, apologising on the phone.
A surgeon has a last-minute space in theatre and calls one of two equally prioritised patients. The first has his phone off, so the second patient gets his op.
Elsewhere, a cardiac consultant discovers from a local GP that one of his waiting list patients has died.
Mr King says: “It’s like there’s been an earthquake in the NHS and the epicentre of that was on intensive care.
“The NHS is going to have to rebuild, but the aftershocks are going to ripple across the years.”