More asleep than awake, an urgent bladder relieving itself, thankfully not into some unfortunately located wardrobe. At such moments I have usually found full wakefulness to be almost entirely superfluous, preferring to take comfort from the fact that I'll soon again be warmly tucked up in my bed.
Thus, I could well have done without that added issue of also having been 'accosted.' I'd assumed the time to be somewhere in the unholy region of 02:30 of a Tuesday morning.
"Mum, mum, mum! Are you alright? Is William okay?"
Yet, with a dawning realisation, some sort of grasp of the situation was slowly beginning to assert itself. I'd sleepily surmised who the "mum" might transpire to be but as for "William," he was highly likely to have to remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. Obviously, a full and frank reply was not yet on the cards. An immediate reply of any kind had seemed highly impractical, perhaps unhelpful in the extreme. The last thing that the confused lady was going to require was a disembodied reply, shouted from behind a locked toilet door. Far more of an element of patience was going to be required; a few further moments of lip biting seeming the prudent choice, at least until my current needs had been fully dealt with. The situation could far more easily be confronted face to face, I'd considered.
Many thanks to Thomas Marthinsen
"Where's dad?" the recumbent and shadowy figure demanded of me; a veritable portfolio of awkward questions was now more rapidly beginning to accumulate.
I crossed fingers and leaped in, hoping that this might deflect any need for yet further enquiries.
"He's still at the hospital, isn't he, mum?" I ventured. Armed with the honourable sword of truth, I'd opted for a gargantuan slice, deep into that billowing cloud of confusion.
In truth, dealing with the rapidly fragmenting NHS had proven well beyond my capabilities. T'was convoluted beyond reason, I'd found. Dad, desperately anxious regarding mum's ailing abilities to cope, had sat quietly bemused as I repeatedly fell well short of orchestrating the much hoped for discharge. I didn't, at 02:30 of a Tuesday morning, think that I really needed to trouble mum with the minutiae of our current dilemma.
Also thank to kevinkarnsfamily
So, with her mind swimming ineffectually between dream and some sort of alternative reality, mum's confused shouts pursued me, determinedly, back to my bed. Devoid of any of the 'right' sort of 'answers,' I was determined not to proffer any further information, hoping beyond hope that I was not, at such an inhospitable hour, going to be 'trailed' back to my room.
Later reference to notes taken at the time, studied in conjunction with a handy copy of this year's calendar, would seem to suggest that it had eventually taken in the region of three-and-a-half days to legitimately reunite my parents, once again ensconced within their own apartment. Memory, or that remaining after severe sleep deprivation, contradicts this, suggesting instead some significant deviation to the universally accepted laws of time. The initial physical discharge took place late the following afternoon, but the pathway to absolute completion was going to prove to be a heavily mine-strewn route.
Finally legitimising dad's discharge, through the turgid process of completed voluminous paperwork and countless phone calls, managed to tack a further day-and-a-half onto the process. Late- almost beyond hope late- on the Wednesday afternoon I was eventually assured that the much sought 'Home Care Package'- that required by a litigiously-concerned NHS hospital- was finally in place. Dad was scheduled to be visited by a registered, sub-contracted carer at some time around 11:00 on the Thursday. Obviously I would not be entertaining the idea of leaving before I'd witnessed this event taking place.
Many thanks, inkknife_2000
It continues to astound me that such anxiety should result from what effectively transpires to have been a lack of 'necessary' paperwork, when this very same system, or perhaps some privatised sub-contracted branch of the same, might so easily have cut my mother adrift with such timely precision, immediately upon my father's admission to hospital.
When I had arrived at my parent's apartment, early on the Monday morning, it had been much appreciated by the confused and unvisited lady, staring with uncomprehending bemusement at a frozen TV screen, a powerless phone lying on the couch, ineffectually remote from its charger. Mum was eager to assure me that she had been coping; there was, after all, an ample supply of frozen white bread in the freezer and the toaster was still fully functional. And there was always the option of an impossible 'pop' to the shops, armed with a debit card that had long since been surgically separated from its pin number.
The 'insurmountable' administrative hurdle that had so 'efficiently' brought about such a state of affairs was that dad's 'Home Care Package' had been specific to dad, one of my numerous telephone conversations had been at pains to inform me. This had been 'clearly' and unambiguously recorded somewhere in triplicate, secreted within the mountains of 'necessary' NHS paperwork, I was assured. Litigation-guarding paperwork takes out long-term spouse and moves to threaten functioning NHS, checkmate!
And many thanks to Joel Franusic
I would imagine that there will be many individuals out there, who will have felt justified in questioning the machinations of any system that can so pin-point-accurately soothe actions and finances in the one direction, whilst habitually stumbling and mystifying not dissimilar actions and finances where the flow needs to have been reversed. Cite the clockwork-like transference of funds, from your bank account and into the black-hole-cyberworld of any multinational company with which you may have dealings. Contrast this with the blundering dinosaur that might eventually and ineffectually crank any monetary flow into reverse and you will understand fully my concerns. It is almost as if these two aspects of the one are operating in two separate parallel universes.
Ultimately, three-and-a-half days and in excess of a dozen phone calls, two trips to the hospital-in-question and approaching a dozen face-to-face meetings with various carers fell pitifully short of managing to reverse a solitary decision that had been so honed as to require no consultation whatsoever, the instant removal of dad's 'Home Care Package.' With regards to whether it is my accumulated notes or those of the sub-contracted, out-tendered and fragmented NHS that have achieved the greater volume I would imagine there can be no doubt. I suspect that my notes, however, will be all the more accessible and pertinent regarding the issue of what might constitute actual 'care.'
That a 'care'-based establishment should so shamelessly and 'efficiently' be observed to cut any vulnerable pensioner completely adrift, whilst ensuring a paperwork-tight-shield from litigation, is surely proof that 'our' fragmenting NHS system is falling woefully short of fulfilling its designated task.
As with oh-so-many perniciously privatised bodies the carefully concealed shortfalls tend to reveal themselves gradually, and through a convoluted series of half-spoken telephone conversations or lawyerly-written legalese. And such proved to be the case here. Thus, it was not until the Wednesday morning that it was finally made crystal clear to me that dad's 'Home Care Package' had become severely less than the previous sum of its parts. A 'new' sub-division (department, unit, sub-contractor, whatever) unveiled itself; 'Enablement Care,' whereby a stopgap amorphous unit steps in to bridge the four-week gap, before the previous system- capable of shutting itself down in the wink of an eye- is able to slowly crank itself up and into action. This is an astonishing efficiency tail-off of some 22,000%. Paperwork eh, one has to laugh... or cry... or conceivably die in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
Special thanks to Dave77459
In my role as unacknowledged and unpaid care-worker, I was also able to 'appreciate,' at first hand, just a tiny fraction of the daily issues with which our admin-shackled ailing army of care workers might be confronted, a few of the temperament-testers with which these social workers might be required to wrestle.
There was the casual racism- no less embarrassing for my having already known of its presence- the nightly worry of potential overdose by a mother who might elect to administer her own painkillers from amongst an array of more than a dozen variable medicines, including 60mg tablets of Oxy-codone (a tablet that might tranquillise a cart-horse or send a super-heavyweight boxer into a coma).
Both of my parents had been saddled with a daily medical regime that might have posed serious problems for many top contestants appearing on the Krypton Factor. My own somewhat modest regime was eventually completely subsumed beneath the onslaught of almost-entirely-pain-related 'requests.' There was the constant demand for shopping; items that for no spoken reason 'needed' to be acquired singly, each requiring its own personal trip to the local supermarket. There was, of course, the ritualistic 'ingratitude' that might follow the most intimate of medical demands, the waiter-like requirements that might see half a bottle of medicine-neutralising whisky disappear of an evening.
Finally, thanks to University of Salford
These were my own parents, I'd never known another, and yet, within such a relatively short time, I found myself being urged towards ever more inappropriate actions. The almost-within-my-grasp lure of the open road, at times, seemed pitifully incapable of slaking such unnatural thirsts. That others might daily find themselves confronted with similar (or far worse) circumstances, efforts valued at little more than the minimum wage, remains incomprehensible to me. Weighted down by the politically-devised forests of 'required' paperwork, frustrated by a growing army of administrators, and always just a small oversight away from becoming the national press's next hate figure.
Harry Beck began the process of mapping the London Underground in 1931, a somewhat organic process that is still being tinkered with today. Should anyone be brave enough to attempt to similarly graphically represent 'our' creaking NHS, I doubt they will be anywhere vaguely as near to a comprehensible result a mere 82 years hence. That is unless the destructive efforts of the likes of JC can be completely reigned in (sign the '38 Degrees' petition), perhaps chained in a subterranean dungeon somewhere, or sealed within one of those nuclear waste bunkers. Do we dare hope that the likes of a toxic JC might be restricted to a radioactive half life of similar duration?
Currently the NHS is cursed with twenty handsomely-reimbursed, so-called Tsars, and counting. None has yet suggested that, in order to bring about the highest standards of possible care for our ageing population, we might consider attracting the best available carers, and, further, valuing the efforts of those currently beavering away under the considerable weight of generated bureaucracy, by paying them a decent living wage.
"If we want to attract the most capable, then salaries will have to be commensurate with expectations." Difficult to pin this quotation down and, let's face it, on the surface it seems most unlikely to have been uttered by anyone currently residing in the coalition. Somewhat of a shock then, to discover that that's exactly where it came from. But, before excitement- more likely disbelief- takes hold, allow me to clarify that whoever uttered these 'wise' word was referring to the salaries of MPs. Apparently there is just a little bit left in that Public Sector pot after all. It almost beggars belief, doesn't it?
If I'm going to be expected to muck in occasionally, with a bit of hands-on care, perhaps testing my patience to some sort of snapping point, the very least I would like to ask for is responsibility for the singular personal care of one Jeremy Hunt (JC).
Coffee anyone?
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