Choosing your hospital – a patient’s guide

If you’ve made it past your GP (well done) and a battery of tests, and you’ve got medical support for an operation, then Good News!  You can now choose where to have your NHS operation, and you are guaranteed a choice of at least five hospitals.

Here’s how it works:

You can go to your nearest NHS hospital.   For reasons to do with economies of scale and budgetary constraints, it’s 10–15 miles away.  Various transport options are available, but it would be brilliant if you could drive.   Convenient for you, and twenty to fifty quid in parking charges for the hospital.  Its clinical ratings are average, if you ignore the maternity scandal.

You can go to your next nearest NHS hospital, which is 15-30 miles away.  The only transport option is to drive.   Why would there be public transport to a hospital 30 miles away?   The clinical ratings are average, if you ignore the organ harvesting scandal.

Your third, fourth and fifth choices are all a long way away.  You will need to book a hotel.  The clinical ratings are average if you ignore (a) the doctor that was on Panorama and got struck off, (b) the damage done by collapsing ceilings because of RAAC cement and (c) any problems caused by understaffing and underqualified North Korean doctors.

And we’ve spent a lot of money on a new NHS App, so that you can make your choice quickly and easily using your mobile phone.  If you can use one in your condition.  See you soon!

PS: Have you thought about going private?   Hungary and Turkey are both good, and very affordable for self-funders.

Picture credit: Wix AI

GP who diagnoses based on 1st letter of patient’s name says it’s only an initial assessment

.

Historians outraged that GPs can retrain as Historian Associates

'It's an outrage,' said an eminent historian today.   'I studied for three years as an undergraduate, took a Masters - another three long years while working in a museum - then got my PhD.  Took me bloody years and my student debt is through the roof.  Now they're allowing medics with a GP qualification to fast-track as historians by taking a two-year post graduate qualification.  Not only that, but they're paying these 'History Associates' two grades higher than me for half the work,' he said, anger brimming over.

A government spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport defended the HA route.  'HAs aren't there to replace historians, they're there to augment them. They can do the boring, repetitive work, freeing up the fully qualified historians to search for Dials of Destiny, Crystal Skulls and Lost Arks - to crack the whip, so to speak,' said the spokesman. He admitted that 'occasionally' HAs have been put on the History Consultant rota to fill gaps. In one such case a HA entered a Temple of Doom without authorisation and caused the death of several assistants by allowing large stone spheres to roll over them and failing to take suitable care with automatically fired knives from booby-trapped caves.

'It's a slippery-slope,' fumed the historian.  'Properly trained historians know how to deal with things like fighting Nazis on top of speeding locomotives, wrestling with snakes or sinking into quicksand. Museum directors are seeing this new grade as a way to replace properly trained historians with inadequately trained historian associates who happen to have a medical degree.  That way they don't have to pay for first-aiders either,' he added.

Image: Photo by Mile Modic on Unsplash