...to be proud to work as a HCP?

[PacificDogwood]

Not a thread about a thread. Although quite obviously inspired by one.

I am not British.
I trained on mainland Europe.
I have worked for the NHS for 18 years.

I think it is a phantastic system and I hope the current political climate will not destroy it or turn it into a shadow of itself.

HCP are people. As are patients.
Both are fallible.
They have off days.
They make mistakes.

There is no excuse for incompetence, but no matter how brilliant a HCP, mistakes will happen. It is terrible when they do, but happen they will.

Life is a lethal condition which will end in death.
In the meantime I try to listen, help where I can (often I cannot), investigate and reassure.

My only contact with the NHS as a patient has been in the context of pregnancy/MC/delivery (ok, and SCBU for DS2).
I am lucky to have had good experiences and, in the end, good outcomes.

Please cheer me up by some Good News stories.
Negative generalisations depress me.

Thankyou to the lovely midwives that delivered my 3 precious babies safely, taught me to breastfeed & generally gave me such good care.

Also the HDU staff who did so much for my Dad in the short time between him being diagnosed with cancer & his death. I will be forever grateful to them.

All the community nurses that came out everyday & tended to MIL with so much care & dignity.

The General ward nurses that were so under stress & overworked but still found time for MIL.

The nurses at the hospice that MIL died at were wonderful as well, It was such a calm, lovely place to be, & they were just fantastic. so caring.

The various HCPs I'm dealing with now on DD's journey to be diagnosed with ASD of some form.
The wonderful HV's that would make home visits because I had a baby & MIL on my hands picked up on it before I did, & every HCP I have met so far to deal with this has been supportive & informative.

I'm eternally grateful to you all, Thankyou so much.

Sorry no good feelings here lately. We were just another number in the most recent experiences.

I've just caught back up with the thread.

Nobody in their right mind could deny that the NHS has problems - being at the receiving end of inadequacies is horrible, but working with them, day in, day out, trying to get things done in the best interest of patients is also... wearing.

RevoltingPeasant, yy re duplication of effort aka tick-boxing. A form has been designed, it HAS to be filled in. Whether or not it is actually useful.
I suppose the flipside is, if something has been overlooked the day before, doing it all again could be a safety net?
We get rediculously long, convoluted nursing discharge letters, they can run to several pages but contain very little useful information to a GP and what information there is, is difficult to find as my eyes just blur with the badly laid out detail-overload. I do not blame the filling-in-nurse, but the 'system' that demand that boxes be ticked, so is no legal come-back ("What, the District Nurse had not been informed about this patient? Can't be, see, it says here that she had been told").

Management is important, but business management has its limits in health care IMO as the same rule just cannot apply as for a profit-making business. The superb managers I have met over the years, have all had close clinical contact with the Coal Face of the NHS; the horrible ones sit in ivory towers, doing sums .

absolutely Pacific - patient need comes first. You have to balance the books but you do that by guile and cunning not by cutting the stuff that matters.

I read bad stories about the nhs and have to assume that I am just inordinately lucky. Family in itu after a fire. They all looked worryingly beaufitul, which I mentionned to a nurse. She told me, just on the right side of patronising, that that was because the nurses had cleaned their (unconsious) teeth, and brushed their hair, etc. They hadn't just saved them, they had groomed them.

Love midwives; a giggling midwife is a good sign.

Friend of mine aged 90 cycled to his gp, for something routineish. The nurse took one look at him, hoiked the GP out of surgery to see him, put him in an ambulance, and he spent 2 weeks in hospital with double pneumonia. As he was being carted off in an ambulance the nurse rushed out to reassure him that she would get his bike home. 'Treated me like a lord!'.

I will never pay enough tax to justify what the nhs has done for my dc.

Is there a big geographical difference?

When I lived in London the GP was fairly hellish, but I didn't really go.

I am not sure about geography... In my locuming days when I worked in many, many different practices my worst experience was in a very affluent area of town with a high proportion of privately insures/self-paying patients. Horrible, horrible practice.
2nd prize goes to a practice in a very deprived area for which I had been employed to do 2 weeks' locum and which was the only place I every considered walking out of after morning surgery. And I had phoned my defense union to find out were I stood if I carried on working there.
Both of those were within the Central Belt of Scotland, so no huge geographical variation.
Only worked in England in hospital some 18 years ago, in the Bad Old Days of 110 hr/wk, antisocial hours paid at 1/3 of normal pay etc etc.

My impression is that over the last generation or 2 or General Practice it has very much emerged as a specialty in its own right, rather than the 'place failed doctors end up is' as a charming unlce of mine once told me.
My DH is a surgeon, he is v good in his field, but pretty hopeless in anything else . But - he can call on a whole hospital of other specialist to help him out...

Sorry about all the typos - I am toddlerwrangling while MNing .

When we started my assessment for Aspergers, they were bloody brilliant. Took from January to October. They went above and beyond the call of duty, very caring people. The only thing is that they seem to be very scared of offending people!

Pacific, I agree that GP has changed in the last generation. GPs who retired about fifteen years ago would moan and moan that they didn't go into medicine to deal with the 'worried well', but for the 'sick'. (I have tried and failed to find the Armstrong and Miller sketch about the gym teacher who ends up being operated on by the two pupils that he ridiculed; 'All work and no play makes the Jack a member of the Royal college of surgeons.)

I will be forever extremely grateful to all the HCP who gave up christmas day/eve/boxing day with their own families to look after my son when he was poorly in HDU one christmas, they were great and still cheerful although I'm sure they would rather have been at home.

Have come across some HCP with dreadful attitudes as well, I really don't know why they were doing the job.

I've probably encountered many more HCPs than most people (say 50+ a year for the last decade, a bit less before that) and the vast majority have been fine to wonderful.
Ditto the administrators who get such a bad press - let's face it, you only notice their work when something goes wrong!

And many HCPs are coping with emotions I certainly couldn't handle at work. When I had it confirmed that I really was pregnant after 7+ years, as the sonographer showed me my 16-week fetus, I was ecstatically gushing how this must be such a wonderful job, being able to give people such great news.
Sonographer managed to politely tell me that actually, mine was the first non-bad news she'd been able to give all morning. It was 11am so she must have seen about 12 women before me and had to tell them all their babies had died, before getting it together to be reassuring to the next one. I am still in awe.

I think a lot of people on that other thread aren't going to be happy with GPs until they invent the tricorder to just scan you and tell you exactly what's wrong - if you come in with standard symptoms you're going to get a standard diagnosis unless something happens to cause them to reconsider! Not to mention all the people I know who complain their GP 'wouldn't give them a referral' about whatever, and when I ask 'Really, you told them about your mum's history of XYZ and they still said they wouldn't refer?' they mutter 'well I didn't say anything about Mum and they said it would probably get better in the next couple weeks and come back if not but they should have made me take my clothes off at least' - aargh!!

I'm a huge fan. Had not been sick or near a hospital until I had a baby in one earlier this year, she has Downs and also was ill when she was born. We didn't meet anything except wonderful care and thoughtful handling from everyone and boy did we meet a lot of HCP. The NICU nurses were impressive but the most impressive of all were the post-natal nurses on the ordinary ward coping with tens and tens of new mothers per day - they literally did not sit down for whole shifts, or rest until all was well (for five mins). Her ongoing treatment has also been fab, from physio through to GP to community paediatrician.

Sorry, main point being - YANBU, you should be very proud indeed.

YANBU people need to stop blaming all HCPs for the actions of one bad one they have come into contact with.