Dr No gazed in open-mouthed if not toothless wonder as the first episode of Frankie (BBC1) unfolded last night. Not content to be the life and soul of the party, Frankie, a SuperNurse for the time being on the district beat, is the life and soul of the known universe. In a script that pasted it on like a bricklayer mortaring a wall, Frankie was given lines to assist even the dimmest viewer to a full comprehension of Frankie’s awesome powers. When cutbacks have ordinary doctors and nurses quivering, what does Frankie do? Why, she laughs at the cuts! When a cut of a literal sort threatens to come her way in the hands of a demented war veteran, she turns the other cheek. Nothing is beyond the toothless wonder’s extraordinary powers. When a child arrests in her car, Frankie becomes paramedic and then emergency ambulance driver; later, she turns her hand to a spot of midwifery. Dr No suspects Frankie has a fold-up operating theatre in the boot of her car, and in later episodes will turn her hand to a spot of surgery. Nothing is beyond Frankie for, as she told at least one gagging viewer, ‘the world is her patient’. When not fixing the world, Frankie likes to turn up the stereo, and dance, turning the show into a musical: Frankie Goes To Bollywood. Truly, nothing is beyond Frankie, but then, Dr No supposes, that is what happens when you have done Torchwood. Even Captain Jack has been turned into a shadow of his former self, a hapless plod who’s always got the wood, but never gets his way, because every time he gets his pecker out, Frankie’s away.
Category: Big Brother
Stilton’s New Prong
Earlier this week, Stilton published a new edition of Good Medical Practice, the lance of many prongs which he and his goons use to skewer hapless doctors. Stilton’s premise is that doctors are a lawless reckless lot, and left to their own devices they will get up to all manner of mischief. From their hidden position behind the net curtains, Stilton’s goons have perceived a new mischief: the menace of doctors who appear incognito on social media. A prong – a somewhat bent prong, since most content on social media is publicly accessible – has been added to Stilton’s lance. New explanatory guidance alongside GMP warns: ‘If you identify yourself as a doctor in publicly accessible social media, you should also identify yourself by name’. Although framed as a ‘should’ rather than a ‘must’, this bent prong has its sights clearly set. For doctors foolish enough to carry on the anonymous caper, Stilton is coming to get you: ‘You should also be aware that content uploaded anonymously can, in many cases, be traced back to its point of origin’. Dr No is not entirely persuaded that GMC goons can trace their arses from their elbows, let alone trace Dr 212.58.244.70 through the complex web of shared internet service provision; but, be that as it may, anonymous medical bloggers are up in arms.
A Dark Nurse
Dr No’s mother has been admitted to hospital – at home. This NHS wheeze is a worthy idea, which Dr No supports. On paper, it is win-win: patients stay in their beloved homes, and the NHS saves money. In practice, it has one minor but fatal flaw. The hospital has a matron, kit in abundance, OTs, you name it, but no ward nurses. It is a hospital without nurses on its wards, and like all hospitals without nurses on the wards, it doesn’t work. Ironically, the money saved by not admitting patients to real hospitals could fund these nurses, but no one in the NHS has spotted this, and so the idea remains worthy, but doomed to fail. One supposes that were Crippen still blogging, he would have done hospital at home full justice, as he once did for another NHS corker, the hospital at night, a hospital whose defining characteristic was not an absence of nurses – rather the opposite in fact – but an absence of doctors.
British Professional Medicine: RIP 2013
Everyone, but everyone, is a professional these days. Even benefit scroungers like Dr No are professional benefit scroungers. Sociologists over the years have woven so many strands and threads through the social construct of professionalism that the term has become so broad and debased as to be meaningless. To borrow from a line attributed to the poet John Lydgate and later famously adapted by Abraham Lincoln, you can professionalise some people all of the time, perhaps even others some of the time, but you definitely can’t professionalise all people all of the time. If everyone is a professional, then no one is.
Etonomics
The school most at large in government today of the science that makes numerology appear rigorous is that known as Etonomics. As much a sect as a school, Etonomics holds that austerity is the one true path. Governments, according to its theories, must grip the economy as a giant python might a fat pig, and squeeze it back into shape. Those parts of the economy that fail to get back in shape face cuts, savage cuts. Not just an ear here, or a trotter there: whole limbs have to come off. These are the teachings of Etonomics, and, strangely enough, they don’t work. The python may enjoy a snack, but the economy dies.
These musings arose as Dr No read a seriously erudite assessment of the failing of Etonomics here. The assessment is long, but a one line summary might be ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’, perhaps suffixed with ‘and you may never, because Tory austerity is unachievable’. To reach this conclusion, Lanchester, the author, makes a distinction between ‘cuts’ and ‘austerity’. Cuts, says Lanchester, are real, and do the damage, while austerity is an orchestration, and a con.
59m in the Life of an Ambulance Control Centre
These days, nothing really happens until it happens on social media. Apart from curmudgeonly old duffers like Dr No, anybody who is anything is busy on twitter. Why, even HRH is on twitter! The NHS, it seems, is all over twitter like pigeons all over Trafalgar Square. Hospital trusts, ambulance control centres, continence control services, you name them, there they are on twitter, tweeting away, like pigeons all over…
In case he is missing something – perhaps he is, since everyone is at it – Dr No decided to observe in real time the emerging tweets of one NHS twitter account over a period of one hour. In the interests of openness and accountability, he presents his observations and, being twitter, it should be read from the bottom of the post upwards. But then, Dr No has never suggested twitter ever made any sense…
The Curse of a Fortunate Man
Over the years Dr No has encountered a number of single handed general practices. His first encounter was on a Scottish island, as a student, in a practice made memorable by two things: the sweet malt smell from the oil drum sized barrel of beer that brewed beside the kitchen range, and the loan of the practice Land Rover, with a licence to roam the island. Later, as a locum, he found single-handed GPs on leave a reliable source of work: he could be transported, as if by a revolving door, to the seat of a single handed GP. For a week or two, he had eyes-only access to almost every aspect of the practice. He saw the intimate details first hand, not as a squinting sociologist might, but as a living participant. And living practices they certainly were, but pretty rum many of them were too. Too often for comfort, opening a drawer in search of a prescription pad, Dr No was greeted not with a jumble of papers, tongue depressors and broken tape measures, but with the clink-chink of bottles of high proof but non-surgical spirit.
A Midsummer Day’s Madness
The doctors’ strike, or ‘industrial action’, as the strikers prefer to call it, has happened. On the day after the longest day (2012 is a leap year), a smaller than expected number of striking doctors turned up for work sporting ARP style armbands declaring ‘I’m caring for patients’, which was a bit rich if you happened to be a non-urgent patient, and smugged their way through their day. As own goals go, it was a corker, more Rear Admiral Hamish McMayhem taking his entire fleet the wrong way up the Windward Passage, than a solitary cocoa bean going the wrong way up Bournville Boulevard. On the radio, you could hear Langho rubbing his hands with glee at the gift of anti-doctor propaganda, while the media at large took turns to shy coconut after coconut at the ‘my pension or your life’ protesters. If proof was needed that Dr No’s former colleagues had lost the plot, then this was that proof.
Auric’s Law
Regular readers will know that Dr No is an advocate of Auric’s Law of Causes – happenstance, coincidence, enemy action – and it so happens that Auric’s Law has been met, indeed exceeded, in four out of four recent NHS encounters by family and friends of Dr No. In each case, the care provided was either partly or wholly inadequate and/or incompetent; and, by Auric’s Law, he concludes these adverse experiences did not arise by chance, but by malevolent force. The malevolent force was the NHS, or more specifically the doctors who provided (or in some cases did not provide) the care. All four cases happened in, or were related to, secondary (hospital) care, but more often than not the GP was also involved in, or at the least complicit with, the deficient care. In all four cases, either the patient or a relative was a doctor, and so an ‘expert witness’, able to ‘read’ what was going on. How much more poor care, one wonders, goes on, but is unnoticed, because the witnesses are lay, and lack the knowledge to read the signs?
A Good Day to Bury a Bad Bill
Conveniently, the Health and Social Care Bill completed its final parliamentary stage on the eve of the budget, ensuring it was in hours knocked off the top of the news pile by Porgie’s Biddy Tax. But, mean as the Biddy Tax is, it is not the erosion and loss of the Pensioner’s Allowance that will hit Granny hard in the years to come, it is the erosion and loss of the NHS brought about by the Tories’ now soon to be unleashed health service reforms that will hit Granny – and indeed the rest of us when we need healthcare – hard. So the question arises: what are we going to do about it?