Long distance hospital commuting

The daily trips to Sunderland have finished for the moment as my mum has now come out of hospital. Having had a wonderful operation day her recovery was not quite so straightforward and she lost a lot of blood, eventually requiring a transfusion. So it turns out the anaesthetist was correct, and that really the operation was the least of it!

It is a relief to have her home as the 50+ mile round trip for visiting became quite tiring after a week. I believe it is important to visit every day for a number of reasons, 1. it shows the hospital staff that someone cares about the patient, 2. it hopefully cheers up the patient, 3. it gives the visitor a chance to see what has changed in a 24 hour period.

In this case between Thursday and Friday the major change in my mum was that she went from pink to grey, stopped eating and couldn't stand up. Quite drastic.

I can understand why the NHS has chosen to create regional centres for certain treatments. What I don't understand is the point at which treatments become so expensively specialist that they need to be centralised.

As usual the human impact of trekking 26 miles to the hospital for the appointment, and then the 52 mile round trip to visit seems to have been overlooked. If I wasn't able to drive it would have taken hours for us to get visit. Totally impractical if it was just my dad, who doesn't relish the opportunity to discover the delights of Sunderland every day.

I wonder how many people feel isolated and overlooked in this current centralising service? When I was younger I worked in organisations that centralised, then decentralised. It is possible to generate very good arguments for cost savings and efficiencies on either side. Believe me, I used to do the figures, you really can prove this stuff either way. I also saw staff burst into tears with the stress of it all.

In 5 to 10 years time the NHS will happilly decentralise again, in the interests of patient care I expect. In the meantime all this change is so very costly and wasteful, if this is not immediately obvious in cash terms it is very obvious as soon as you become a patient and have to try to work out where you are in a very complicated system.

I also received a recruitment email today advising me that there are lots of opportunities due to the recent regionalisation of the NHS. So how exactly does that work? You reduce the number of organisations but you develop vacancies? Obvious isn't it, the staff who didn't feel like being merged, and who had enough length of service, have taken pay-offs because they don't want to travel to the new regional centre. Hmm so very efficient. All those one-off costs going through the books.

I truly hope that this centralisation stuff is central government stupidity again. Otherwise the regional people need to give themselves a good talking to for a lack of common sense and humanity, both towards their own staff and the general public who have little choice but to be NHS patients at some time.