Hospital wards are filling up again – with fakers

How do I know that Britain’s Covid crisis is over? The fakers are back. The hypochondriacs, the psychosomatics, the pseudo-fitters, the attention-seekers and the lonely. They’ve started to return to the acute medical ward where I work. They’ve been gone so long I actually almost missed them.

This collection of patients, who take up time and resources inversely proportional to the state of their physical health, simulate symptoms for gain (malingerers), simulate/induce their symptoms for the pleasure of the sick role (Munchausen’s syndrome) or genuinely experience symptoms such as pain, seizures or paralysis in atypical ways with no physically identifiable or treatable cause (now vaguely termed ‘functional disorders’).

Members of the first two categories often end up with the label of the third because it is easier than confronting them about their behaviour, though in my experience this only emboldens them to continue abusing services. Before the pandemic, they took up a huge amount of time and resources at the expense of others, and often with no satisfactory outcome for anyone involved.