In our hard-pressed NHS, must sympathy be rationed too?

Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from people of all ages and types. The other week I saw an elderly Middle Eastern man bent over a bin in a ward corridor, crying almost uncontrollably. I asked him the problem and he stuttered out that he had been watching his daughter sleeping, and he believed she was going to die.

I went off to find a nurse as I felt I didn’t know enough about his situation or hers to help. The nurse wouldn’t tell me anything due to patient confidentiality. I returned alone to the man and tried to sympathise. He managed to say that his daughter had food poisoning. I didn’t think that sounded too bad, but he added that his wife had died of it. It seemed complicated, but there was no one to ask, no one came to calm him down and there was no place we could go for privacy.

The same day I met a young Muslim from Southall, west London, with a chest infection aggravated by alcohol abuse. He’d been sent here as a child to live with his grandmother; his mother stayed in Pakistan. He qualified as an accountant, but depression and drink had left him jobless and homeless. ‘If I leave here,’ he told me, ‘I have nowhere to go.’

I asked a nurse about him. She said he had ‘plenty of relatives in Southall’, which he did. From what he’d told me he didn’t like any of them much. She said they’d ‘offered him their support’ so ‘the housing department is not interested’. And neither was she.

We are constantly told that the NHS is wrestling with its budgets. We all know that there is no money left for any extras for patients, such as toothpaste, bed socks, chiropodists and good food.