Yes, I’d heard you were having the same ‘captcha’ problems too. Wonder whether any rightwing bloggers are having the same issue..

Thanks for the kind words!

In my 50 years plus experience, the nurses, doctors, porters, and all the people who care for our ills are even better now than they were when I was a boy. Thank you all for choosing to help us in our times of need.

I used to be a nurse for many years. I trained under the old system before Project 2000. I’ve never worked as hard, been so tired or enjoyed a job more in my life. After training I went on permanent night duty in a busy A&E department in a smallish hospital. It was a great, friendly place to work and because during the night there were always fewer staff on duty we all supported and relied on each other. We would often have crazy busy nights when it got to around 5am before anyone got chance to sit down with a brew. We gave our all for our patients because that was why we were there and this fact alone was for me the reason why I got so much job satisfaction, despite the crap wages.
Then along came Thatcher and her divide and rule ‘quasi-market’ ideology for the NHS. Suddenly we were not all one hospital any more but an NHS Trust divided into Directorates. Staffing levels started to drop. We were instructed to order cheaper equipment such as substandard paper gowns with no sleeves in and nothing to tie them together at the back so patients felt exposed and embarrassed wearing them or the cheaper intravenous drip tubes made by some company connected with Tory MP John Gummer that somehow never worked properly…cheaper dressings, cheaper everything.
Each Directorate had its own nursing budget and the responsibility for this was devolved down to chief Nursing Officers (NOs). This had some perverse consequences such as the NO of the Medical Directorate who was responsible for the cardiac arrest team telling the NO of the Surgical Directorate she’d reached her monthly quota for call outs of the team so any further use of this service would have to come out of the surgical budget…a huge row broke out. Nurse was set against nurse and morale began to suffer.
I have no idea what its like to work in the NHS now but what I do know from recent experience as a patient is that wards are chronically understaffed. Despite this I received excellent care from nurses and doctors alike. They saved my life. This nurse baiting is a typical Tory tactic not unlike their attack on benefit recipients. Its lazy and dishonest politics, its unfair and its ugly.