There are many greetings one might grudgingly accept as adequate when one arrives at a hospital emergency department. But a sign saying ‘Helpdesk’ is not one of them. ‘Reception’, ‘Report here’ or even ‘Check-in’ would have been a tolerable overture from King’s College Hospital when I pitched up with my hand crushed and bleeding.
But Helpdesk? Helpdesk is what you thrust in people’s faces when they are queuing for IT support. Helpdesk is what you tell people they are getting when they want to make backup files from their hard drive. Helpdesk is not what you offer people who are hoping for their broken limbs to be treated.
I suppose I was asking for trouble going to a south London A&E after getting my hand stuck in a horse’s mouth. But as I ride in Surrey and live in Balham, I had not wanted to go to a hospital miles from home in case I was detained overnight. So I got myself back into town. Wrong decision.
It took me 20 minutes queuing behind people wanting free dental work just to reach the ‘Helpdesk’, and when I did a man with all the communication skills of a piece of stripped-off wallpaper looked at me and grunted. No ‘hello’, no ‘can I help you?’ When I offered the information that a horse had bitten through the middle of my hand he said, ‘Uh?’
‘Horse bite,’ I said loudly, and mimed a set of jaws clamping down. Nothing.
‘Horse?’ I said. Blank. There’s your problem, I thought. ‘Hand crushed,’ I said. ‘Ow!’
‘You bin ’ere before?’ he mumbled.
‘What has that got to do with it?’
‘I need a lot of information to register you on our system.’
So I pretended to faint from the pain, which, to be fair, I had done three times earlier. This earned me the privilege of a 30-second consultation with a cheerful girl who took off the bandage, called me ‘hon’ and confirmed that the bruised mass would need X-raying. It would be a two-hour wait. She gave me two paracetamol and some leaflets and turned me loose in the waiting area to be coughed over.
With nothing to do except catch flu and throb, I read my leaflets. One was called ‘Animal and Human Bites’ and bizarrely concentrated on advising me to give up smoking. The other was called ‘Rice’ but should have been called Riceep because it called for Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation, Exercise and Painkillers and mostly insinuated that I had fallen over while drunk. Both had adverts for personal-injury compensation lawyers on the back. So, not so drunk I can’t sue, eh?
Suddenly a crushed hand didn’t seem that bad. I calculated I could get stronger painkillers from a chemist and a tetanus jab from my doctor the next day. I could pay for a private X-ray and, most importantly, if I did all that I could leave this horrible place, go home and lie down.
This is how it happens, you see, the flight of anyone with a few quid from the health service. Faced with care barely compassionate enough for a goat, a person who earns more than the minimum wage will quite happily spend their money on medical help which involves them being treated like they are a) human and b) not feeling well.
And so I slunk off home and to my GP the next day. But the nurse who gave me the jab was appalled when I asked for an X-ray I could get quickly and pay for. As soon as I revealed myself to be an NHS denier, she refused to help me out of my jumper and sat and watched as I struggled one-handed trying to expose my upper arm. After thrusting a scrap of paper with a phone number for a private clinic at me, she then refused to check the wound. I couldn’t take it any more. I wanted sympathy and the only way I was going to get it was to recant and convert. So I agreed to try the small-injuries walk-in centre that she boasted I would be in and out of in 20 minutes…
A couple of hours, actually, including a strange episode in which I was shunted between two X-ray departments which both claimed I was the responsibility of the other.
I had to fill in three forms, one of them about my ethnic origin with no fewer than 16 choices for what sort of white I was, and a 12-point questionnaire on my alcohol use which, as I’m teetotal, was especially pointless. I got a lot of angry looks when I handed it back with just the ‘never’ option ticked on the first question.
Wanting sympathy? Not a binge drinker? It’s just not playing the game.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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