My day begins with the arrival of a text message from our local health centre. It reads as follows (I paraphrase a little for dramatic effect):
‘Over Jul and Aug, PLEASE ONLY CONTACT US IF YOU HAVE AN URGENT MEDICAL NEED.
‘Our staff are either on holiday or isolating so we can’t manage non-urgent requests over the holiday period so contact us again in September if you are still alive.
‘Use NHS choices to treat yourself or the local pharmacist for minor ailments.
‘Thank you for your help over this difficult period. Try not to get ill and hopefully we’ll see you in the autumn.’
Part of the story is that people are getting ‘pinged’ by the NHS app when they have been in the same town as someone with Covid-19. This is pretty well unavoidable given the current levels of the virus but it is making life very difficult for everyone and not just health centre staff.
I was ‘pinged’ myself when my household went down with Covid-19 and was instructed to isolate not for 10, but then 20, days. This was somewhat irritating seeing that I am double-jabbed and have tested negative on a near daily basis by either lateral flow or PCR tests. As I have many millions of followers to this blog – well, a handful, then – I have to be careful what I write so you can take it as read that I followed government rules to the letter, much in the same spirit as Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock. And it’s important that people follow all the rules laid down for them by…er…Cummings and Hancock by not travelling the length of the country to spend a week in their second home or getting into a ‘steamy clinch’ with someone who wasn’t their wife. I have done neither of these things because I am as pure as the driven snow. An angel. Almost.
Anyway, back to the health centre, or not as the case may be. If I have another mental health meltdown, it will probably straight to the Samaritans if I can’t alleviate the symptoms by shouting at the television or, like yesterday, the freezer. (Don’t ask.) But what intrigues me much more is this instruction not to contact the centre unless you have ‘an urgent medical need’. Now, I don’t know about you but a visit to the GP is something I studiously avoid unless I think it could be serious. My recent GP visits – and these were all pre pandemic – were for what turned out to be a ‘fistula’ (if you are about to eat, then I suggest you Google it later) which required surgery (ouch), a growth on my upper back which turned out to be a Lipoma and my British Red Cross-induced mental breakdown. I do not visit the GP unless I consider it to be serious enough that I can’t deal with it by way of a few Paracetamols. Am I alone in this or does everyone else visit the doctor for something that’s very minor, like a cold or sore throat?
It’s not just my local health centre that ‘s halfway up Shit Creek because they have no doctors or gatekeepers to stop you seeing a doctor: it’s the entire NHS. It’s blindingly obvious that the government will soon loosen the restrictions on NHS workers being forced to isolate if they subsequently test negative and doubtless the rest of us will soon find the NHS app tweaked to stop unnecessary pinging, always assuming we haven’t by now deleted the app altogether. (Again, I cannot possibly condone this but I do know of many, many people have deleted the app and many others who never downloaded it in the first place.) Given the shambolic handling of the pandemic by Boris Johnson’s government, I place responsibility for the unravelling of the latest shambles right at his door, his desperation to fully reopen the country in One Big Bang, rather than carefully and sensibly, has brought about yet another self-inflicted crisis.
On the brink of Margaret Thatcher’s re-election in 1987, Neil Kinnock’s famous words, ‘I warn you not to get ill’ were never more apposite, or relevant to, today. The NHS has been forced to your average punter to heal thyself for the rest of the summer and decide for yourself whether you have a benign tumour or cancer.
You might think this is all a bit of a laugh, given my leaden attempts to lighten the mood, but it isn’t. The NHS is no longer there for us 24/7. How scary is that? Now, when do my anti-depressants run out?
