The workhouse mentality
Dr Grumble has lost count of the number of hospitals he has worked in that used to be the local workhouse. People used to be terrified of the workhouse. Men were put one side, women the other. Husbands and wives were separated: children were separated from their parents. As a student Dr Grumble used to wonder why patients were terrified of going to particular hospitals. It wasn't MRSA. It wasn't that the hospitals were dirty. It was because the hospital had been the workhouse and the terror which the workhouse had held had carried over to the time when the workhouse had become a hospital.
In the Grumble hospital we have a new young consultant. She is very good and very enthusiastic. She is an integrated consultant or something like that. Dr Grumble is a hospital consultant but if you want money for a new consultant these days you need to go into integration mode. It's all to do with the government mantra that patients do not like hospitals and want and should be treated close to their homes. Perhaps this is right. Perhaps it is wrong. It really doesn't matter because that is what we are required to do. Dr Grumble has a patient who is chronically ill. Mr Coulthard is a nice man but he is struggling to manage at home. The nice young integrated consultant has been to see him. She has persuaded him to go into a home. Or she thinks she has. The idea is that he will go into a home. His wife will be elsewhere. It's like the workhouse. But Mr Coulthard is has changed his mind. The integrated consultant is said to be baffled. "I've been with my wife for 60 years," he told Dr G today. "I don't want to be apart from her". Nor should he be. We still have a workhouse mentality.
We treat people like this because they are old and don't matter. Or so you might think. But it's worse than that. The truth is that it is nothing to do with age. It is just that our systems do not begin to understand what matters to people.
What is the worst the Grumble hospital can through at you? Whether you like it or not Dr G is going to tell you. If you are a young lady and you have a baby that you are breast feeding and you have the misfortune to, say, have bad pneumonia you might think that the Grumble hospital would allow you to bring your baby into hospital with you. But no. That is not allowed in the Grumble hospital. The managers keep hectoring the staff about putting the patient first and patient dignity but you are not allowed to have your newborn baby in the Grumble hospital with you. It is workhouse mentality. It is an outrage. But it is not something Dr Grumble can do anything about. Which is one of the reasons why he has a blog.
