Whether or not nurses at London's Whittington Hospital failed to change 94-year-old Rose Addis' blood-stained socks while she languished in a casualty side ward for three days, the political furore around this case trivialises the problems of the health service.
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The facts of the Rose Addis case remain contentious. However, the basic story as we have heard it will strike a familiar chord with many inner-city GPs, stirring instinctive sympathies with the staff at the Whittington. In my practice in Hackney, we have many elderly people, often living alone, who appear to have little support from their family.
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When some sort of crisis occurs - a fall, a chest infection, a heart attack or a stroke - the long-lost relatives suddenly turn up, often from some distant suburb where their upward social mobility has taken them. Usually, they are helpful and supportive, but sometimes it seems that a combination of guilt and shame at the plight of grandma is expressed in anger and resentment directed at doctors and nurses.
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It is also not unknown for elderly people to express prejudice and hostility towards their carers. The fact that nurses, recognising that such patients may be ill, frightened and confused, commonly turn a blind eye to such behaviour makes it particularly galling when they are subjected to ill-informed criticism by relatives, never mind being pilloried in the press and in parliament. This is why many healthcare workers will have appreciated the staunch support offered to the Whittington staff by the hospital's medical director Professor James Malone-Lee.
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The Rose Addis case provides the perfect focus for the sort of petty squabble that now passes for party politics in Britain. For the new Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, the story provided an opportunity to raise his profile by identifying himself with an emotionally charged victim of government policy in the NHS. Having put the trembling lower lip at the centre of British politics, prime minister Tony Blair was not in a strong position to object to his opponent resorting to emotional manipulation as a device for challenging the government's record in health.
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Both party leaders appear to have forgotten the 'war of Jennifer's ear', one of the key controversies of the 1992 election campaign. Then in opposition, the Labour Party tried to use the case of a little girl, claiming that her ear operation had been delayed as a result of Tory cuts in the health service.
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When it emerged that Jennifer's parents belonged to the rival parties and they were drawn into public bickering over the facts of the story, the case backfired badly on Labour - who proceeded to lose the election. (The curse of Jennifer's ear fell on the GP who provided the story to the then shadow health minister Robin Cook; a promising career in the Labour Party came to an end as he was banished to a sort of Camp X-ray at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel.)
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As the party leaders alternately try to squeeze emotional capital out of the Rose Addis case and then accuse one another of cynicism, tastelessness and violations of confidentiality, the real problems of the NHS are ignored. Though Rose Addis may not be a good example, there can be little doubt that the treatment of old people in A&E departments in many hospitals is a disgrace.
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While the government has made much of its campaigns to speed up treatment for patients with cancer, many more patients with less newsworthy but often no less debilitating conditions are waiting longer and longer for appointments and for treatments. Treatments by paramedical professions, such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and many more are delayed by chronic staff shortages. Patients referred for specialist investigations, such as X-rays and scans, are facing longer delays.
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The problems in the health service deserve more proper discussion, and less of the hysterical point-scoring we have witnessed over the past week.
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Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism, Routledge, 2004 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle, Routledge, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA). He is also a contributor to Alternative Medicine: Should We Swallow It? Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
NHS in traction, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
'Teflon Tony' and the Tories, by Rob Lyons
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