It helps if the doctor actually looks at the X-ray

16 January 2008

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James Hughes-Onslow reports on the wretchedness of breaking an ankle and then having to persuade the man in A&E that his agony was caused by more than a sprain

It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to stay where we were, where staff knew about broken bones and where there was a comfortable hostel for patients’ relatives, rather than return to the bosom of the NHS where we might catch MRSA.

Well, now I’ve broken my left ankle and this time I had no choice. My motor scooter skidded on slippery cobbles outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and crushed my foot. No one else was involved. Indeed, passers-by were extremely helpful. One man picked me up, while another put the bike back on its stand and they each offered to call an ambulance, or to accompany me to hospital. I eventually persuaded them I was perfectly all right by hopping back on the bike, still shaking a bit, and going home, where it was my wife who said I really did need hospital treatment and took me to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell.

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Joanne

January 17th, 2008 8:35pm Report this comment

This is another horror story about Britain's NHS to add to my stock of anecdotes. As I read it, I felt my own glasses beginning to steam up. But I have to remind you that, in the non-national health system here in the USA, horror stories also abound. We hear or experience incidences of sloppy, uncaring doctors spending about 5 minutes with their patients (after a two-hour wait), or of people not getting the coverage they needed at all, even when they're insured. Believe me, a totally private system is not the answer. I think that it's Canada's system that most Americans envy.

Lydia P Troyer

January 18th, 2008 11:47pm Report this comment

Only the return of the ferocity of 19th Cent Penal laws and Parish Poor House rules will return this country to anything better than Hobbes' "short, brutish & dull" lifestyle. Those who will have no respect for the law must be be made to fear the law; otherwise we have a 3rd world economy with revolving juntas at the top, as people fend for themselves and who you know is more useful than what you know. A return of the right to bear arms would be useful, too. An armed society is necessarily a polite society, except where bad governments interfere and grant monopolies to favoured groups, like law enforcement & criminals, while leaving the populace empty-handed. I remember thinking in the 70's that we're going to regret the retirement of all those rudely fierce & starched ward sisters from the war years.

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