Here’s why the NHS is broken

I was having tea with my neighbour in her second-floor flat when a man, a stranger, appeared in the room. This is quite a regular occurrence at Alice’s. She’s deaf and she can’t really walk so any number of agency staff have access to her front-door key. They materialise wearing gloves and usually a face mask, and because Alice relies on lip-reading she hasn’t a clue what they’re about to do to her. Is it bath time? Injection time? Oh, it’s fun to be housebound and old. This time the man had a clipboard which he consulted, then said: ‘We’re going to hospital.’

Alice turned to me: ‘What did he say?’ Over the years, she and I have worked out a decent way of communicating, mostly though eyebrow raises: ‘What’s the world coming to?’ And shrugs: ‘What can you do?’ This wasn’t in our repertoire, so I turned to the man and asked: ‘What’s it for?’

He looked at the clipboard again. ‘She has an outpatient appointment.’

‘But how is she getting there?’ I asked him. ‘Ambulance.’ He gestured to the window and, sure enough, there was one parked in the street below. Alice had fallen a few months before and broken her hip so the idea of a check-up made sense, but not much else did. ‘How will you get her down the stairs?’ I asked. The man looked at Alice’s set-up: bed, commode, armchair, all side-by-side with a Zimmer in front. Then he looked at Alice, who isn’t fat but isn’t bird-like either. And we were quiet for a moment, considering those two flights of stairs.

Then Alice, who’d picked up the gist, began the painful process of leaning forward, gripping the Zimmer and tipping weight onto her swollen feet.