NHS Fire Death Plan

There are adverts in this country produced by the government detailing your actions in the case of a fire in your home:

o       Get Out
o       Stay Out
o       Get the Fibre brigade out

We’ve got a similar one in the NHS when a fire alarm goes off:

o       Hang around
o       Look up from newspaper at colleagues to check they’re ignoring it too
o       Light up a fag – you’re safe till the alarm goes off
o       Look out window to see if you can see a fire engine
o       Sniff air – can’t smell any smoke?  That’s fine then
o       Carry on with what you were doing before fire alarm broke concentration, but if you see actual flames then walk in opposite direction

On the down side, if there’s ever a fire in an NHS building all the staff in patients will be incinerated, on the plus side, it’s unlikely anyone will really miss them, and of course given that fire alarms go off every ten minutes in the NHS the system would grind to a halt if anyone paid them any actual attention.*

*If you are a junior doctor, remember, if you see a fire, do not waste any time telling anyone about it:

Junior Doc: ‘Nurse, there’s a fire in the sluice…’

Nurse: ‘Sorry Doc, I’m just back from holiday/a bank nurse/an imposter/drunk/on crack/a prostitute’ (delete as inappropriate)

JD: (dials emergency line) ‘I want to report a fire’

Emergency porter: (in local patois) ‘sorry son, we’re flat out here reading the Daily Star’

JD: sighs and walks off to leave patients to burn to death/fights fire bare handed and gets on front page of local newspaper*

*delete according to whether you can be arsed or not.

The self serving parasitic nature of nhs management

At last, a management decision more stupid than the 'dancing underpants to prevent MRSA' idea from last year:

So we've got a new 'system'* for ordering blood tests. Don't worry, it meets all the criteria for a new NHS 'system':
1. The original one worked fine
2. There are other systems in existence that drastically need updating but have been ignored.
3 The new system is worse than the old one
4. The new system costs ten times the value of the known universe.

You see, we used to order blood tests on a piece of paper - pick up the piece of paper, put the patient's details on it, write the tests you want, put the blood bottles in the plastic bag et voila, 6 times out of 10 you would get back a result not completely different to the one you requested. So they thought they'd computerise it. God knows why. I mean why? Why? There are just so many things that should be computerised, like you could get a robot to say 'no' to x rays instead of paying a radiologist to do it. What was wrong with the damn handwritten forms for blood tests? Absolutely nothing that's what.

So the new computer system is
i. very slow
ii. very counter intuitive
iii. requires another (yes another I now have two thousand) bloody password that mutates every three days and has to consist of fifteen numbers letters and smileys to be valid and
iv. only one doctor can use it at anyone time so there's a huge queue of medics at the computer in clinic waiting to print off the forms.

*Total load of sewage

So we go on the ward this morning, and the computer has run out of the request slips. So we ask the ward clerk (who is by a complete miracle actually at work and, rumour has it, with the full knowledge of the Trust) to get us some more slips. But she can't. She needs approval from Sharon Waites in management, and she's off sick with 'flu* so we'll have to wait two weeks. 'Whatthefuck?' we say, but we already know we're beaten.

*'flu ie a vague sniffle accompanied by a strong lack of professionalism.

What's worse is that management have efficiently* removed all the old handwritten forms. So if you're having a bone marrow tranpslant in our area then you won't be having any blood tests because Sharon fucking Waites is blowing her nose infront of daytime television instead of doing what she should be doing which is sacking herself and handing herself in to the police as an Oxygen theif.

*ie contrary to every bone in their body

You can email blog posts! Whatever next!

Maybe helium skis?

Nurses are always good

Have you ever complained about the nurses? Of course you haven't, that was a rhetorical question. Similar questions would include 'Have you ever tried sandpaper on your eyes?' and 'Hey, wasn't that Iraq invasion great?'. There's a scene in the French polemic 'Germinale' where a rather nasty male shopkeeper is beaten to death by the females he has been oppressing, during the beating they rip off his genitals and display them at the top of a flag pole. I can now reveal the history behind this hideous scene: the author, Emile Zola, had a medical colleague working at the Hopital Des Curses Hidieuses et Horrifique in the leprosy quarter of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century (or is that the turn of the nineteenth century?). Anyway this colleauge, let us call him Nom Fabrique, was working on a geriatric rehabilitation ward; it occurred to him that the nursing practice of recycling the patient's gastrointestinal contents using a Veronique ano-oral circulator (basically a watertight tube that joins the patient's tail end to their mouth) may have been contributing the unusually massive death rate on the ward, and he resolved to talk to the Sister of the ward. He approached her using the correct fashion, kneeling with his eyes averted and hailing 'all hail queen ra' at a fixed distance of one hundred yards; the junior nurse gave him leave to approach to fifty yards; here he prostrated himself flat upon his belly and licked the floor of the ward the requisite sixty nine times; here the senior staff nurse beckoned him to with ten yards of the ward sister; keeping his eyes averted he begged for permission to speak; the ward sister assented with a single contraction of her left pupil; Dr Fabrique then raised his concerns about the gut recycler, and asked if the practice could be abondoned. Immediately the Sister drew herself to her full height and exploded into flames, the brightness of which turned the walls black; the flames scorched Dr Fabrique to a crisp, and the senior staff nurse skewered him through his catflap with a spare drip stand; his innards were hurled to the junior staff nurses and health care assistants, and he was left hoisted infront of the hospital gates as a warning to junior doctors who would dare to complain to the nurses. And that is why you should not complain to the nurses. You're leaving in six months time anyway dammit, so what's the goddam point.