Earlier this year, I wrote, out of a mixture of bewilderment and frustration, about my experience as a novice in-patient at what is widely regarded as one of London’s premier teaching hospitals. I had been admitted with a badly broken ankle, and the result was three stays of just a few days each over the course of a month: the first (from A&E) for an operation that didn’t happen; the second, ten days later, for an operation that did happen, and the third two weeks later after the wound became infected.
As a reader, you might be tempted to dismiss the lot of us as an entitled elite who have been insulated from reality for too long
The central point of my piece was the nigh-total information vacuum that surrounded me and the impossibility of finding out pretty much anything about either my care or my condition. Even trying to persuade a nurse (or assistant) to divulge whether the regular blood pressure, oxygen and temperature tests were OK was like wringing blood from a stone.
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