All the staff in the NHS are amazing and I have the highest respect for them all.
Franklin, they aren't all amazing. Whether that is through lack of money or just being "short staffed" they aren't all amazing.
I had the very unfortunate experience of spending a night on a Surgical Assessment Unit. This would be about four years ago. The guy in the next bed to me (on my right) had been pressing his button and shouting "nurse" for about an hour or more. He ended up shitting himself.
A guy across from me, but a little to the right, his name was Zak - he cried for a nurse for hours - he vomited all down himself and was left to lie in it. I think he was a stroke victim. I saw his wife come to see him the next day - they had no idea of what had happened the night before. They probably assumed that he was being cared for,
The guy directly opposite me on the ward was screaming in pain - no nurses attended. After hours and hours of this, they gave him a shot of morphine. Have you ever tried even thinking of going to sleep with someone screaming with pain?
That was quite a night. Whilst all of this was going on, the nursing staff did continue with their hourly routine of taking BPs and temps etc of everyone on the ward. As they walked past someone shouting "nurse", they looked in the opposite direction.
This happened in the Coventry Walsgrave Hospital. It has a fancy new name now.
Franklin I am with you - the staff in the NHS are amazing - just not 100% of them. I applaud most of them.
The next morning the bloke in the bed next to me (on my right) couldn't stop saying sorry that he had shit himself. I got to know him a bit better - he had been in the SBS. He could have made that up I suppose. I don't know though, for some reason I believed him.
During the afternoon a nurse had been taunting him (this is true). She was saying "you are ex police aren't you?" or "you are ex army aren't you?" Why should any of that be relevant at all? I think that they thought that as he had always had a position of power, he could use that in his present position. I had heard him explaining that at the Warwick Hospital (where he had come from) he had been getting IV Paracetamol - he needed it again. The nurses just kept telling him that there were a lot of "poorley" people that they had to attend to before him. Basically saying "Wait your turn!" This poor guy had no stomach at all - it had been removed, cancer.
I honestly believe that he was ex SBS. I shook his hand when I left the ward the next morning - he looked a massively tough old bird, although very small in stature.
To go into the mystical.... he told me that Kevin would be ok (this was the guy screaming in pain) - he said that he had seen angels looking after him. I winked and said that I had seen it also.
