Hospitals, eh? Don’t you just love ’em? Well, no actually. Most of us don’t like them at all. Plenty of people say, “I hate going into hospital!” and very few say, “I absolutely love going into hospital.” You never hear someone say, “I’ll tell you what: my favourite place is a hospital. There’s nothing I enjoy better than the sight of a catheter being fitted to a pensioner with Alzheimer’s or a cheery visit to the oncology ward.” They are a necessary – essential – requirement of life. There’s not much we can do to make the experience any better, is there?
I’m a regular hospital visitor at the moment and I have noted that the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) has done its best to make the visitor experience less unenjoyable. For instance, when you go in you have on your right a branch of Costa. Of course, you do. There are various other shops like Boots the Chemist, WH Smith and best of all M&S food. All we really need to complete the visitor experience is a branch of Wetherspoons.
As we left the BRI last night, it occurred to me, unaccountably, I must say, that I had not done the annual cheese shop. As M&S came into sight, I wondered aloud if they sold my favourite cheese. And to prove there really is a God (spoiler alert: there isn’t really), they had two packs of it. In the magnificent hospital when people were receiving treatment for both minor and major ailments, I had bought some cheese.
As for the hospital itself, it’s still part of the greatest institution we still have, the NHS. A simple idea from a different time when society concluded that all of us should be regarded as equal in terms of their health. Instead of charging an admission fee at the entrance, we the people decided that we would get the same quality of treatment whether you were a prince or a pauper. Well, sort of. No. Forget the prince stuff. Prince Philip was yesterday flown from Norfolk to London by helicopter after developing a ‘flu like illness’, a privilege I suspect that might well be denied to one of the plebs. But generally, we’re all the same.
My thought when entering hospital is always that I’d rather not be there but more that the person I am visiting was not there. It is uplifting and inspiring to see doctors and nurses at work and I marvel at the levels of care and, yes, love they give as part of one of the most important jobs of all. The corridors echo, the lift doors open to reveal patients in various stages of illness, often attached to complex machines by a myriad of tubes and wires. And arriving in the ward, there’s the bleep, bleep, bleep of the various monitoring machines. No, I don’t enjoy hospital visits, but it beats the thought of what would happen to people without hospitals.
We still live in an age where the dark philosophy of Margaret Thatcher still hangs over us, a philosophy that says there is no such thing as society, we don’t have to think about, nor care, for anyone else and finally that greed is good. The NHS, even with added Costa, M&S and maybe one day Wetherspoons, is still what binds us together as human beings. Long may you run!
