Laura FULCHER
Seven months into the pandemic and hospital trusts continue to bar families from bedsides. This barbaric practice must be added to the NHS’S list of “Never Events”; the register of mistakes that should never occur. For why is incorrectly prescribing medication, a cause of harm that currently features on the register, any more traumatic than facing death alone?
From March, the sick began disappearing in ambulances, never to be seen again; their distressed families unable ever to say goodbye. Ill children were torn from the arms of weeping parents, separated for weeks for hospital treatment.
On Thursday, I read of Emma Kingsley, who finally, joyfully, became pregnant on her sixth IVF attempt. But at 18 weeks, after a scan discovered her baby’s developmental problems, she endured a termination alone, the grieving father unable to offer support from the car park outside.
It’s all necessary, health leaders say. “Protect the NHS!” seems to trump all other concerns.
But must we really sacrifice our humanity to minimally decrease clinical risk? By now, with seven months behind us, shouldn’t health providers have found creative solutions to keep families together?
I continue to face cancer follow-up scans with no hand to hold. During appointments, panic often overwhelming, I have no loved one to ask the questions, nor truly take in the doctor’s updates.
I became pregnant in May, a miracle for a body that’s faced cancer twice before the age of 35. Yet joy is mixed with the certain terror of experiencing a complicated labour largely alone. My partner will miss those first precious days with his daughter. Why are these basic human needs now the lowest of all health priorities?
The blame doesn’t lie with Covid alone, but with a health policy that lacks compassion. Whoever writes this stuff has forgotten what it is to be human. Take the NHS’S Long Term Plan, the strategy document promising to carry us into a future of healthcare excellence. You’d hope to find it structured around what patients need, but instead the focus is on clinicians and clinical activity. In February, Matt Hancock was right to state that poor communication is the most common cause of NHS failings. Yet this word features just once in the Long Term Plan’s 136 pages.
To provide a truly compassionate NHS, health leaders must create a patient strategy – a crucial document that doesn’t focus on reducing clinical risk, but treats patient priorities as being of prime importance.
Perhaps then, the NHS might stop needlessly separating families. And the “Never Events” register will not just include mistakes resulting in clinical risk, but barbaric practices that undermine our very humanity.