Hospital care: A case study in disparity

Photo courtesy of Eastern Daily Press 2011

Last weekend, a 90-year old man was rushed by helicopter to an NHS hospital in Cambridgeshire, after suffering chest pains. He had a blocked coronary artery, but was otherwise healthy. He was immediately admitted, operated on and discharged after four nights of exemplary care.

Two weeks ago, an 89-year old man with severe kidney problems and breathing difficulties was rushed by ambulance to another NHS hospital, this time in South London. It took him hours to be seen, a male nurse told him to go home as "they needed the bed" and that "there was a bug". He was there for four days where the afore-mentioned infection made him sicker. He was finally discharged, none the better for his care. The differences between these two men? One was the Duke of Edinburgh, whilst the other was the father of a close family friend. Let's call him Michael*. I think you can guess which of them was cared for in NHS Papworth, Cambridgeshire.

I have up to now not written disparagingly of the NHS, mainly because as a person who needs regular checkups for a lifelong thyroid issue(and the occasional trip to A&E for terminal clumsiness), I have mostly found it to be excellent. But I am under the age of 30.

What I find so sickeningly unfair about the Prince Phillip/Michael situation is that Michael, a taxi driver who paid his taxes right up to the date he retired, was left to wait for treatment by a stretched, understaffed and uncaring hospital, whilst one county over in affluent Cambridgeshire, a man who has his care and expenses paid for by the civil list, from our taxes, was rushed in and operated on immediately, and given excellent aftercare . Now before you think I am having a spectacular Daily Mail-esque rant about free-loading royals, I will point out that these two men have vastly different health conditions and thus their treatment would of course be different. But I doubt Prince Charles would be left trying to find a doctor for hours to find out exactly what was going to happen with his father. I doubt that any of the nurses would have been dismissive and lacking compassion. There would have been no talk of bed-saving. In fact I would be willing to bet that NHS Papworth would have been top-to-bottom terminally cleaned every day.

Why is there such a disparity between NHS hospitals in quality of care for our elderly? This Christmas, I watched as Michael was being cared for at my friends' house by his loving family; they are desperate for additional help with palliative care- as I write this now, they are currently waiting to see if he can finally have a carer to take the strain off his exhausted daughter. If it were Prince Phillip who needed one, I bet one would have been provided at the drop of a hat.


*name has been changed to protect identities.