My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like a Saint-Tropez lothario. The nurse rubs his foot to bring blood to his veins, and I lean over the cot to feed the greedy midget, who squawks just once as he’s stabbed.
I watch the drops bulge and drip and I puzzle over the NHS and its mysteries. Why do nurses collect baby blood in glass straws with an opening no wider than a pin? It’s like an impossible task set by a whimsical tyrant.
Even more surreal is the way the NHS handles patient records. Because the midget and I have visited so many parts of the NHS — maternity wards, A&E, GP surgeries, neonatal units — we’ve become a crack two-man investigative team. Did you know that every hospital keeps separate records for the same patient, and that they don’t, often can’t, share them, even in an emergency? I had no idea.
My boy was born in a different hospital from this one, on the other side of town. He has already had various tests but my local hospital has no access to the results. To find out his blood type, for instance, they simply test again. More heel-warming, more squawks. Hospitals are meant to communicate with a patient’s GP, but it’s been a month since the baby’s first jaundice test (we were admitted via A&E) and his registered doctor is yet to be told he’s being treated. Hospital records have to be handwritten by doctors, explains the GP when I ask, then posted or faxed over. They’ll get round to it eventually.
Why handwritten? Why faxed? No patient under 20 would even recognise the word.
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