Meet Cute

First of all, my son is free. He has tested negative and is out of isolation. We consider his room to be high risk and will talk about decontamination measures later this week. He appears to be in a better state of health than my daughter who has recovered from the non-COVID virus that she may have caught from my wife.

I watched Meet Cute with my daughter. I really liked it. It was sick and twisted and funny. I doubt I would watch it again, but I would have had no issues if I had paid to watch it in the cinema.

Anyway, time for bed.  Good night all.

The NHS since 2010 and it’s ability to do things now

A Government-commissioned paper has pinpointed the budget squeeze that the NHS has been under as the key reason for service’s loss of capacity. This was carried out by The Kings Fund and basically says what I and many others have been saying for years. 

You get what you pay for and if you do not fund the NHS properly, it cannot compete with heath outcomes when it was better funded, or of other systems which are resourced better. 

The house of ill

My son is still in isolation, my daughter may not be able to attend her Sixth Form College tomorrow and I may be coming down I’ll as well. My wife, though unwell herself appears to be improving. We hope that my daughter has what she has, as opposed to my son, but if she comes down with COVID, the odds are that I will get it, which means either my wife looking after us all, or the end of isolation. 

I have been working as I am hoping to be off next week, initially at work, but this was freezing and once I had finished the work that has to completed there, I came home to work from home. 

I did get to watch the football from yesterday, well the highlights, and while I think that we should have had some decisions go our way, we played well and can leave the tournament with our heads held high 

And it is snowing. It has settled, but when I took Leia for her walk, it was starting to melt. Let us see if she likes playing in the snow when it is daylight.

The plague, again

My son has contracted COVID again for the third time, bringing it into the house for the second time. One of his friends on his school trip came down with COVID but that was a while ago so he must have escaped that and instead, got it off someone else.  I have noticed that with this latest variant, people have symptoms for a few days before testing positive. He is now in his room with unlimited access to Netflix on the iPad of my wife and is in isolation again. 

My daughter is not 100%, and my wife herself is on the mend from a cold herself. Other that a minor sore throat, I am fine in myself and have had a nap so that I have the energy for the Christmas Party at work. With no symptoms, I am ready to go! 

NHS football comparisons

Another manic day. I was not on call, but helped out a bit, and am still behind on paperwork from my days when I was on call.  While catching up on paperwork, I did get to watch the Holland equaliser against Argentina and the penalty shootout. 

Before this surge in workload due to Scarlet Fever, working in the NHS could be summed up as playing for England against France with eight players and no subs. Now we are playing against both France and Argentina at the same time. I am lucky to work with a great team, and while we don’t have eight players, I would say we have ten. But there are no subs on the bench. Now with Scarlet Fever, the numbers needing to be seen have doubled.

My MP claims that the NHS is to get better, but it has got worse while the Conservatives in charge, and the reasons are simple, it is not funded properly. 

A paramedic who works with us cannot remember a time before 2010 when he had to wait outside A&E to hand over a patient, something that is far too common how. I have had a patient wait hours with a fractured hip before he was taken to A&E, a patient with a possible heart attack giving up and coming to see me the next day due to symptoms. None of this happened between 1997 and 2010 when Labour was in charge of the NHS. 

What a day.

Tuesday and Thursday were nightmare days at work. At least today was not as bad as Tuesday, but on Tuesday, we had antibiotics to treat Strep A. The government have said that there is no shortage of antibiotics, and technically they are right. But there is a shortage of the correct forms of antibiotics needed to treat this. On Tuesday I dealt with one parent who was not able to get penicillin in liquid form. Today, as there is a shortage of amoxicillin which was existed before this public health crisis, I have had to prescribe capsules which had to be broken up so that children could get the treatment they need. The erythromycin liquid that I prescribed on Tuesday was hard to find today as is liquid penicillin.  We do have these antibiotics in other forms (tablets and intravenous forms) so when Conservative politicians say that there is no shortage of antibiotics, they are right. But tell that to a parent who cannot find the liquid forms of antibiotics that their child needs.

PMQs and PPE (again)

I watched PMQs with my daughter after it had taken place due to work commitments. She was at home as she had an inset day. After Starmer lost the first questions on housing, the issue of PPE came up.  Again, I admire the actions of the Conservatives when it came to Nightingale hospitals (though staffing would have been an issue) as well as changes in the law to allow doctors to certify deaths without risking death.  

But PPE was a big issue, not just the lack of it despite the findings of Exercise Alice and Exercise Cygnus, but how our nation exported PPE even though we had a huge shortage because those who raised how we could supply our frontline workers were not part of the Chumocracy.  Even then, the PPE sourced by those friends of the Conservatives was not up to our standards!

Matt Hancock has appeared to blame frontline workers for bringing COVID into nursing homes, but this would have been less likely to happen if we had decent testing and also PPE.