Wait and bleed

One aspect of our fine kingdom that endlessly fascinates me is our National Health Service. Established after World War II, it originally aimed to provide basic (if universal) healthcare, but today, it has grown into the world’s fourth-largest direct employer. In the first full year of its operation, the Government spent £11.4bn on health in the UK (including vast one-off setup costs), whereas last year, it spent £126 billion on an already-established infrastructure. We spend almost as much on the NHS as we do on pensions, and far more than we do on education, yet the health service is constantly being described as under-funded. It has become all-consuming, a ravenous monster that swallows as much money as we can shovel at it, and this poses a simple question – why are our Accident and Emergency wards such shambolic places?

The other day, my dearly beloved managed to twist her ankle. When she tried to stand up, the pain was so severe that she passed out, collapsing face-first onto a metal staircase. Cue an anguished 999 call, a hastily-dispatched ambulance and a race to the A&E ward of our local hospital. So far, so good. Except, once she’d been checked in, she was then left on a hospital trolley, concussed and bleeding from an open wound, for a full three hours before anyone bothered to see her or administer treatment.

Why? There were plenty of (presumably junior) nursing staff, milling around the individual bays that surrounded a central observation desk. The desk itself was piled high with idle computers and flat-screen monitors that endlessly played screensavers. There was, as there always is in hospital, someone incessantly walking back and forth holding a bundle of papers whilst actually doing nothing. Nobody was in a hurry and some of those bays were clearly empty. And yet hours rolled by without a doctor or consultant bothering to inspect someone who had already confirmed her necessity for treatment by being completely unable to walk, arriving in an ambulance, vomiting repeatedly in response to concussion and shock, and bleeding from an open wound for hour after agonising hour.

As a distraught observer, it’s hard to describe the impotent fury you feel in such a situation, although anyone who’s ever experienced a British A&E ward will probably know exactly what I mean. I certainly did, even before this event. Over the last five years, my average visit to A&E has lasted four hours. Once, disgusted at the advertised five-hour waiting time, I simply went home, returning at 5.30am the next morning. Even though there was only one person in the waiting area when I arrived, and three when I left, it still took three and a half hours for me to be seen. On another occasion, having been endlessly passed from one department to another, I abandoned my hard plastic chair and walked out, deciding I could not possibly be worse off in my own bed at home than I was in the supposed sanctuary of a hospital, watching drunks fight and toddlers screaming. Friends tell despairingly of interminable waits with the sick children who supposedly get to queue-jump, while the total absence of comfort, entertainment or basic information updates has driven even patient people to that impotent fury I mentioned a moment ago.

I know the swollen ranks of NHS defenders will be cracking their knuckles here, as they prepare to unleash a tirade of the vitriolic abuse I mentioned in my last post, so let me spike your guns and save you the bother by saying that I have never met an incompetent NHS employee. I’ve known and socialised with many health service staff in my lifetime, from paediatricians and cardiologists to porters and counsellors. Each has been a conscientious and kindly individual, motivated by the desire to help the sick, and they’ve usually been as frustrated by the NHS’s frontline failings as I am.

If you’re in labour, or battling cancer, or in need of expensive medication, the NHS can be almost literally miraculous, and it’s lauded around the world as a pinnacle of how a state should protect the health of its population. I should also point out that the ambulance team on Sunday were brilliant, the consultant who eventually arrived was calm and efficient, and the nurses we saw on our arrival were model professionals. So, back to my original question. If we can get so much of the NHS right, why is its accident and emergency heartland such a consistently inefficient, laborious, frustrating shambles?

Cyber waste

As the more astute among you will surely have noticed by now, I have started writing a blog. However, in the age of trolling and cyber-abuse, I’m perversely fascinated with the concept of who might be reading this column, and what they might think of me as a consequence of my relatively unguarded ramblings.

That’s honestly not as egotistical as it sounds. In recent weeks, online editorials from established journalists like Philip Hensher at the Independent and Suzanne Moore at the New Statesman have triggered avalanches of bile and opprobrium from the serried ranks of the easily offended. Many respondents have demanded the injury, castration and/or murder of said writers, while Moore joined a growing list of public figures who have closed their Twitter accounts in response to viral venom.

I can’t say I agree with the opinions expressed in either of these controversial articles, but to paraphrase Voltaire, I defend their right to voice an opinion. What worries me is how violent people’s reactions can be nowadays, from behind the relative anonymity of their keyboards. Just like road-rage, which usually abates once you step outside the supposed sanctuary of your vehicle, I bet the harpies who howl for a writer’s blood in response to a perceived slight would be rather less feral if they sat down face-to-face, and thrashed it out with a direct discussion. But the internet doesn’t allow for that. You are reading these words from a location I’ve probably never been to and can’t even imagine, which means any criticism I receive is going to be travelling at speed down a one-way street.

The change in the strength of people’s reactions to things they don’t approve of has been rapid, horrifying and predictable in equal measure. Back in the dark ages of the 20th century, individuals like Mary Whitehouse got very easily offended on a regular basis, but they did so in a generally polite way, and they backed up their opinions with real names and postal addresses. They didn’t write anonymous death threats, or adopt a pseudonym before promising to throw acid in the face of those whose opinions they opposed. As people’s anonymity increases, it seems, so does their malevolence, and the internet is a very anonymous place. The freaks come out at nine and it’s twenty to ten, to quote Sebastian Bach (not that one, the other one).

Why does any of this matter? Everyone knows you don’t feed the troll, blocking people on social networking sites is easily done, and if some sad inadequate wants to post a comment below this blog saying they hope I get crabs, their comments reflect worse on them than on me. And yet vitriolic website comments still carry the power to upset – I’d be a hard-skinned individual if I could declare full immunity from the slings and arrows of outrageous forumites.

In truth, I’m not likely to say anything especially contentious on these pages. These blogs will probably become so much cyber waste, littering the hard shoulder of the information superhighway, and being read primarily by people who already know me (hi, sweetheart). But if you do feel inclined to use capital letters and lots of exclamation marks to emphasise your burning loathing of my latest oeuvre (or anything you read online, for that matter), just take a minute to wipe the foam from your lips and consider. Is it really worth the hate?

Enteralterego - read me first

Being a freelance copywriter is a fabulous career path. That might seem a pretty obvious statement, especially when it's made by a freelance copywriter, and it's also not the snappiest way to start my inaugural blog. Please bear with me, though - that sentiment is very important, in terms of everything that will follow on this site over the coming months and years.

Writing is a great way to earn an income, but it's also incredibly hard work, and most of the time, you're not really getting the opportunity to write what you truly want, or believe. You might be able to cultivate a specialist subject (or two, in my case - residential property and cars), but the chances are you'll be writing on behalf of clients, who will typically only accept positive critiques and glowing commendations of their products, services or personalities. Even writers working in the media are usually constrained by creative straitjackets like house writing styles, over-enthusiastic sub-editors or enforced bias.

This leaves the creative writer in something of a quandary. Since discretion is the better part of invoicing, what can be done to indulge the sheer, undiluted thrill of sitting down to a blank page, and simply writing whatever takes your fancy? When does a freelance writer get to be honest, and not worry about using intransitive verbs instead of their (more socially acceptable) transitive siblings? Is it unprofessional to insert three bracketed words into a sentence? And what volume of vitriol would befall any poor writer who incorporated four successive questions into one paragraph of text?

Well, this blog is my riposte to such nit-picking. And I know I'm not supposed to start a sentence with the word "well" followed by a comma, much less start one with "and", which is a conjunction designed to straddle two words rather than to connect two sentences. Don't bother observing that I've incorrectly used a past participle in a rant about cheese, or inserted more than the recommended two commas in one sentence, which, apparently, is grammatically poor. I'm off the clock, as our transatlantic cousins are stereotypically believed to say. Perfect grammar is taking a well-earned holiday, although its cousins punctuation and spelling will be keeping order in its absence. And do you know something else? Apart from incorrectly using a conjunctive again, I might only proofread these blogs once before I upload them. How decadent is that?

As for my subject matter, that will be as free-form as my sentence construction and observance of linguistic conventions. I might write about queue-jumpers, or woolly jumpers, or anything else that takes my fancy. This is not a plug for my company, the award-winning G75 Media copywriting agency, and nor is it intended as a showcase for my lexicon of arcane polysyllabics. It's just me, slouched at my desk and probably wearing a dressing gown, writing for the sheer unmitigated joy of it. Copywriting doesn't get better than this.