What do you actually need?
I want to have a holiday in the sun this year; what I need is time off from work during the year to recharge my batteries. What I might get is a couple of weekends away as a midway kind of compromise! This summer my lovely son will head off for a year in California. This is a study year abroad as part of his degree. I am willing to make this sacrifice and hopefully early next year I’ll get to visit him, maybe we may take him to Vegas for his 21st. I am blessed that generally he doesn’t expect these things but is pretty pleased when they come his way. He does however believe that anything is possible. He is young and when you are young you can probably expect anything.
I wonder though if we don’t want too much these days? If we don’t assume someone owes us something? Certainly in healthcare there seem to be many people who fit into this world.
Suppose you feel that after 3 children your boobs are just a little droopy and your life will be just perfect if the NHS were to buy you just a little surgery? This is a want, it is not a need. This is the friend of a work colleague; I doubt it will happen.
Suppose you developed a small swelling in your groin lately, you have some pain and discomfort and you see a surgeon. Surgery is recommended, perhaps it is needed. When through an administrative error this is denied (all be it briefly) you shoot off a few nasty letters to the people you consider responsible. You kind of jump up and down. You get what you want, though you would have got that by being less nasty. Real issue I dealt with last week.
Out there though there are real people in real need. People who seem to be being denied the care and consideration they deserve. These people are often elderly, they often don’t complain much less shout, demand or write rude letters. Why don’t we do better by these people? Maybe we are too distracted by the ones who want something they don’t need?
The link to the dispatches programme on the secret shame of the NHS can be found here! Not sure how long it will be there for.
Comments on: "What do you want?" (5)
WOW – I know it is not all like that, but I believe it should never be like that. Attitude and resources. Like we have said before, it is not who runs our services – public or private provision – but how those services are provided. Thanks for the link.
It is true that those who ‘shout’ the loudest get seen first. Maybe because they are justified in their shouting, maybe because it ‘shuts them up’, stops them from becoming or continuing to be a nuisance. Sad but true of human nature.
The thing I feel is sad, we seem to agree on this, is the total lack of vocational in those areas where vocational is or should be implicit. How do we put the vocational aspect of care back into nursing, and administrative thought patterns of what health care is all about?
Cheers.
It is the squeaky wheel which gets the grease.
I remember being in an orthopeadic clinic a few years ago and one of the consultants was talking about a patient who had to be seen very quickly as she had complained to the hospital and her next complaint would be to the papers.
This patient hjad learned how to work the system to her advantage.
Ah but was the complaint warranted?
Sometimes they are and are ignored, only then do you start to, shall we say, shout louder. In this day and age of litigation it is necessary to make sure all really is well.
I have a problem caused by neglect and disbelief in what I was saying about a problem I had – nurses and doctors know better – not in my case, some 40 years later I still have problems. Had litigation been at the forefront I would have been sorted a lot quicker, sadly out of fear not competence. Why did I not complain at the time? Because the problem was a leg in plaster hanging in the air and the problem was my heel had been plastered too tight. When they finally gave way to my Mum’s demand that I was not a cry baby, my heel was turning gangrene and was saved just in time – with skin growth and soreness ever since having to be sorted. I could not see the problem and my Mum did not see it as they covered it with a bandage.
It is important to be aware that everybody works a system somewhere along the line. That is just human.
I have no problem with complaints if they are justified, NHS is never going to be perfect, but this woman knew how the system worked and used it to her advantage. In my area it seems that people are going to the papers first to get what they want and as the papers love a good story regardless of facts they get their publicity.
As it happens I have also recently used the complaints sytem about my hospital, but I felt it was warranted.
People should complain, otherwise how will things ever improve and how will the appropriate people be held to account. You can be nice with it though, not rant as if you have swallowed a copy of the daily mail! I have also had recent experience of people who go to the papers before they even bother to complain to the people who they consider to have done wrong!