Sunday photoblogging: hospital

This week’s picture is quite an old one, of the sculpture outside the then-new Bristol Children’s Hospital which is directly adjacent to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where I spent a good past of the last week following an acute gallstone attack (with associated pancreatitis) last weekend. On the Thursday I had my gall bladder removed (which turned out to be slightly more complicated than anticipated) and by Friday I was home. I’m now resting and recuperating, but basically feeling fine. Some reflections on the experience below the fold.

As everyone knows, the UK’s National Health Service, our “single-payer” system, is in crisis, with its constituent trusts running large deficits and no plan to fix things. But I have to say, these people are pretty good at keeping up appearances and my own experience was excellent. I came in on a Saturday night, just before the pubs emptied (having stupidly delayed getting attention in the belief that the pain would pass). Though the drunks did arrive in Accident and Emergency eventually, it wasn’t too bad, and I was swiftly assessed and seen and then moved to a ward with several other patients for observation. 48-hours of “nil-by-mouth” isn’t much fun, but the lovely people who work in the BRI, from all over the world (showing what a nonsense immigration policy is) made things tolerable. And my fellow patients were good company too, particularly a young Somali guy who had broken his arm playing football. He was visited by a large number of relatives and team-mates who talked to one another in an impressive number of languages (Somali, English, French and Dutch) with quite a lot of seemingly random code-switching. Eventually I was moved to a single room with en-suite bathroom and then allowed home briefly before being readmitted for the operation after a couple of days (and back into a single room again). Not everyone gets this single-room/cubicles, but they are at least as comfortable as several cheap hotels I’ve stayed in, and definitely beat the student accommodation at Queen’s Belfast I lodged in recently. I also got the benefit on an MRI scan (not cheap) and the service of a specialist surgeon who also works in the private sector, and all more or less immediately. Cost to me, nothing (unless you count the taxes I’ve paid over they years, which are looking great value to me right now).

I’d not stayed a night in a hospital since 1958, though I had hung around Lennox Hill Hospital in New York in 2000 where my youngest had an appendectomy, and I have to say it was interesting to watch this society in miniature (and working system) in action. Yes, it is an efficient system for the management of bodies, and you get a clear sense of that. But it is also a system composed of people who are extremely dedicated and caring and who make you feel that your individual well-being matters to them (and this goes for doctors and nurses, but also for porters and caterers). I’m extremely grateful. It is also, to some extent, a mirror of wider British society with a fairly clearly delineated racial and class hierarchy. Doctors are very posh and incredibly well-dressed, mostly, though far from exclusively, white. Of these, the men favour stripy shirts or a sort that’s a rather recognized marker. Nurses are mainly English, Irish, EU (Polish, Romanian, Portuguese etc) and Filipino. Cleaners and people delivering food are black, and seem mainly West Indian. Porters are working-class white Bristolians or Somali. There are lots of exceptions to these generalisations of course, but they do make you wonder about the processes that sort people into jobs, with some of the broad patterns being the obvious ones of social advantage and disadvantage, but others involving elements of choice and self-selection.

Lots to think about, and maybe to write about it the future, but for now I’m glad to be home.