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From Boris Johnson’s pledges that don’t add up to Sajid Javid’s visit to a ‘new’ hospital, NHS staff are being taken for fools
In my first year as a doctor, I witnessed the fetid reality of crumbling NHS real estate. Arriving at work one morning on the emergency assessment unit – the frenetic hub through which most of the hospital’s acutely unwell patients passed – I discovered it had ground to a malodorous halt. Men in hard hats were shouting orders to nurses, porters were evacuating patients on trolleys. I was told a main waste pipe on the floor above had ruptured, with predictably rancid and unhygienic consequences. So much for being an NHS teaching hospital of global renown: we were literally awash with slurry.
I was reminded of these unsavoury events by Sajid Javid, who tweeted last week: “Looking forward to opening one of new 48 hospitals [sic] later today.” Imagine bragging about building all those new hospitals when the existing ones are so rundown and dilapidated, they can’t even contain their human excrement.
