I’m living proof doctors should work weekends
A patient is 15 times more likely to die on a Sunday than a Wednesday
Iremember vividly the day I was informed by a hospital doctor that I really didn’t want to have my procedure done at the weekend because the mortality rate was so high, hee hee.
Maybe I misremember his chuckle at the end. In my defence, I was twisted and hunched in pain like Quasimodo, almost deaf, blind in one eye, nauseous, unable to walk and my face contorted with what must have looked like a palsy, but was an unspeakably debilitating headache. Oh yes, and I had just given birth to my second child.
“I know it’s our headache, but we can’t do anything until Monday,” he said. “There’s nobody here who can fix it.”
The term “our headache” was an acknowledgement that my appalling state had been caused by one of his medical colleagues, a grumpy obstetrician who had bungled my epidural so often (three times) that she had given me a dural puncture.
The resulting hole meant cerebrospinal fluid was draining away from my brain, hence the excruciating headache. Sometimes it repairs itself, but not in this instance. Bizarrely, I was prescribed caffeine, but as there were no caffeine tablets in the pharmacy, my notes said “six cups of strong coffee” a day.
It didn’t do any good. I was assured en passant that I wasn’t going to die but, to be honest, I wasn’t convinced. (The baby, meanwhile, was worryingly comatose, but with all the hot beverage-making going on, nobody noticed.)
I’m not at all surprised that lives are lost unnecessarily at weekends, although Jeremy Hunt’s figure of 6,000 is, by any standards, shocking.
If consultants working on Saturdays and Sundays is the key to reducing the toll, then it’s outrageous they don’t do so already. The idea that an NHS patient is 15 times more likely to die on a Sunday than a Wednesday is unacceptable, iniquitous and unconscionable.
Yet since the Health Secretary announced his determination to instigate change, any number of consultants have come on the airwaves protesting that they do, in fact, work at weekends.
So which is it? Informal arrangements are clearly not adequate, and without wishing to cast aspersions at consultants, weekends are not sacrosanct under the Hippocratic oath.
As for me, come Monday morning, the only consultant who could repair my puncture mercifully appeared by my bedside. To my relief, I could almost make out his silhouette with what remained of my vision.
He was reassuringly ancient and venerable and explained that a number of medical students and junior doctors would like to watch him perform this most unusual procedure.
It involved yet another epidural; this time, a sample of my own blood would be injected into the hole to form a “patch” that would clot and seal the puncture.
Having already had so many needles in my spine, I was full of trepidation, but there was no other choice. I duly submitted to both the procedure and the audience, not least because I thought it might be good if more than one consultant were able to perform it. Possibly even at weekends.
It was a success, and the pain ebbed away. By that time, however, it became apparent that all was not well with my daughter, who, after one night of constant screaming, had fallen silent and failed to wake up.
She was whisked off to the special baby unit and underwent a gamut of tests, including brain scans. It was awful.
I lay distraught on the ward, with a tiny pair of embroidered slippers lined up in the empty cot where she should have been, when a doctor came back to check whether the dural patch had worked.
I told him it had, but that my baby was ill and I had a stress headache.
“Oh well, that’s not our headache,” he responded with a jauntiness that was nothing short of horrifying. He then turned on his heel and walked off.
Can I please throw into the ongoing NHS debate that human kindness is not a sign of weakness, any more than working weekends is an affront?