Feeling ill at ease with NHS cuts

LIFE AND OTHER BITS: SO-CALLED routine operations are to be cut (maybe amputated is a better word) as the NHS turns itself, for some, into a No Health Service to save money.

Those with painful piles, standing up to read this column, or dodgy varicose veins (sitting down), or cataracts (through a magnifying glass) won’t think of their cancelled operation as “routine” at all.

But they should think themselves lucky. National figures show that dozens of people went into hospital only to have operations on the wrong part of the body — a part that was, perhaps, a personal treasure.

There have been operations on the wrong eye, knee, kidney or limb and even, in the most alarming circumstances, on the wrong patient.

So there you are, going in to have a cartilage operation on a damaged knee to improve your prospects of entering the 2012 synchronised swimming contest at the Olympics, and coming out minus a kidney, or possibly a foot. But hanging on to that damaged knee.

The National Patient Safety Agency (no, I’ve never heard of them either) refers to these wrong body-part or wrong-patient operations as “never events” as though perhaps calling them that will mean that they never happen but they do.

And, as Jimmy Cricket says, there’s more.

We now have lots of doctors providing night cover for your friendly, neighbourhood GP, tucked up in bed in his or her nightgown when you have a health crisis, who can hardly speak or understand English. So, my advice to you is don’t get ill, and if you do, clearly label your poorly part or parts in indelible ink and get yourself a library of foreign language phrase books.


NO, I’ve not been at the Scottish holiday Lagavulin, but a round of applause today for Oldham’s much-maligned (not least here) planning committee.
Faced with two developments that breached the rules — an over-large extension and a stable that had all the trappings of a luxury house — the committee ruled that both had to come down. Hopefully these rulings and any future rulings that show the same tough observance of the rules will stop developers from trying it on.

Not for the first time, however, the committee upset the good folk of Saddleworth, approving illuminated signs on the Greenfield branch of Tesco. The Tesco juggernaut’s mission to conquer the world — it already has Oldham in its thrall — will not be stopped by a protest from Richard Knowles, even though he is probably the only person in Oldham who is good at geography.


FINAL WORD: It is difficult to decide whether the residents of Werneth should be pleased or worried that they have not been forgotten by the Housing Market Renewal team.
The words of board-em-up, knock-em-down Alastair Graham, HMR’s hard-hat supremo that residents of Werneth “are at the top of our to-do list” might be thought to have sinister overtones.