NHS loses its soul if it loses its humanity
IT is a chilling image. A vulnerable 74-year-old woman dressed in a nightie, wandering along a road at 3am. What is even more chilling is how she managed to get there in the first place. Barbara Hazzard should have been in hospital. Hours earlier, she had been taken to St John’s, in Livingston, by ambulance with a suspected heart attack. When the hospital discharged her in the early hours with no money, no clothes and no way of getting home, she started to walk. Were it not for the taxi driver who spotted her and called the police, she would have walked the four miles home in her slippers.
Mrs Hazzard says the staff ‘kept saying I must have family I can call’. When she explained that her daughter was actually an in-patient in another ward in the hospital and her grandson lived more than 30 miles away, they replied ‘we can’t do anything’. When she told them she would have to walk back to Blackburn they ‘didn’t bat an eyelid’.
I would like to think this is an isolated case but, honestly, I’m not so sure. Several times in the past year I have found myself in the position of trying to organise a way home for a relative or partner who has been discharged with no warning. You ring the ward to try to get an idea of what’s going on, get dismissed with a vague ‘maybe today, maybe tomorrow’, and then suddenly you’ve got a loved one on the phone telling you they’ve been turfed out of their bed with nowhere to go.
Surely there is some sort of middle ground here? Surely there is a way to free up a bed and not hurl a pensioner out on to the street in her nightie at three o’clock in the morning?
Because if there isn’t, then I truly worry about the direction in which our NHS is headed.
Earlier this month we learnt about 78-year-old Alexander Withnell who was sent home from hospital – in a taxi this time – still wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown. Confused and disorientated, he was left shivering in the street after the Western General hospital in Edinburgh failed to tell his family he had been discharged. His son eventually found him collapsed in a stairwell. He died two weeks later.
We all understand that hospitals are busy, frenetic places, where life-and-death decisions are made every day. We also know that our NHS is crippled by chronic underfunding, staff and budget cuts, and an ongoing bed shortage. No one who works for the NHS has it easy, and some issues have to take priority.
But I would also hope that in the midst of all this, there is still space to be a human being. To be compassionate and caring, and to realise that turfing an elderly, vulnerable woman out of hospital in the middle of the night, or sending a man home in his dressing gown without telling his family, is the very opposite of everything the NHS is meant to stand for.
And to understand that sometimes, when there is nothing else to give, a little compassion goes a long way.