‘Every job we do starts by listening to you.’ I stand staring at this sign for a long time as I queue at St George’s Hospital, Tooting.
The waiting area of the X-ray unit is like the easyJet check-in zone at Gatwick when they’ve just cancelled a flight to Alicante. No, that’s not right. It’s like a bombed-out military airbase in a failed state mid Nato evacuation.
People of all creeds and nations are swarming about. The chatter of a dozen different languages makes an impenetrable din. Some are desperate. Others resigned. The more robust ones are trying to make the best of things. I’m sure I spy someone firing up a portable camping stove.
I could have misread it, of course. A David Koresh-style cult leader could have set up the headquarters of an end-of-days hippy camp. Old men sleep on chairs pushed together, women pace with babies on hips. There is absolutely no system. I bet David Koresh had a system. I bet he had someone standing on the door of Mount Carmel in Waco with a clipboard: ‘Do you have an appointment to set yourself on fire? Very good. Please take a seat. Mr Koresh will be handing out lighter fuel later.’
The NHS boasts no such discipline. The chaos starts at the main entrance where the welcome board bears no mention of an X-ray department. You ask at reception and they look at you like you’ve demanded a bowl of spaghetti bottarga.
When the hospital was built it must have occurred to someone that one of the things people might be wanting when they pitched up here was an X-ray. It’s not as if they didn’t give the place some thought. There is, for example, a very nice M&S Simply Food, so I probably could get the spaghetti. But an X-ray? Nada. I wander around asking anyone who will listen to me, mostly mad people and those with no teeth.
Guided by a million different suggestions from the dispossessed and the never possessed I roam the corridors like a refugee. When I finally see the words ‘X-ray’ it is like finding a sign for the British Consulate in Tripoli.
As I enter the waiting room I am brought up short by a sea of people. There is a reception desk, but when I approach it with my green card they point to a tiny office with more people crammed inside the doorway.
So I stand behind those people and wait. And wait. And nothing much happens. And when I finally get to the front the woman at the desk doesn’t even look up. So I cough. And she doesn’t look up. And I say ‘excuse me’ and she doesn’t look up.
And that’s when I see the sign next to her head on the wall. ‘Every job we do starts by listening to you.’ What can it mean? Is it a code? It is printed in fancy lettering and has obviously been done on a computer. I mean, someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make this sign. What for? What were the precise orders that led to it being created?
Perhaps a nurse, during a quiet moment between telling patients to go and queue somewhere else, turned to a colleague and said: ‘Here, Janice, we ought to get one of them signs saying we listen to patients…’
Or maybe a manager, in between counting queue numbers, happened upon a particularly stern legal warning about the risks of being sued by people who felt they had not been listened to and decided that a way of guarding against such actions would be to display some literature about listening.
I say ‘excuse me’ again. This time she looks up. ‘I’m sorry, but do I hand this card to you?’
She snatches it from me and looks at it as if it is an order for that spaghetti bottarga. ‘We can’t do nothing with that,’ she says, before explaining that a green card entitles me only to the right to queue up in order to book an appointment. I say, ‘All right, can I do that then?’ And she sniggers, ‘Well you could, but you won’t get one for at least a month.’
I intimate that I could die before then if there is something wrong and she nods and says, ‘Hmmm.’
I say the only thing I can think of doing now is to pay a private doctor. She says, ‘Yes, you’d be much better off doing that.’
I thank her and go back out into the multitudes. The numbers are growing. There will be sanitation problems soon, and that man with a moustache is clearly planning a coup. Possibly some of the people will simply start living here, giving the X-ray department as their fixed address. I don’t suppose anyone will notice.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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