Monthly Archives: February 2016

Sticking plasters

29 Monday Feb 2016

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I love the NHS. I pretty much live and breathe it. I work full time for the NHS and at weekends I work as a contractor for NHS Trusts on front line ambulances.  When I have a day off I am often to be found at the doctors or the dentists with one of the kids.  The NHS is awesome, always there when you need it.  Anyone who has been ill abroad will tell you that the NHS is something to be proud of.  If I am ill , I don’t have to think about whether I can afford to go to the hospital or the GP,  I can just go.  I might have to wait, the hospital or GP surgery may be a bit tired looking, but I know that I will be looked after. 
However good the NHS is though, it is not a lot of things; it isn’t social care, it isn’t a hotel and it most certainly isn’t a miracle worker.  Much as those who work in it would like to work miracles and cure each and every person who walks through the door. 

The NHS is stretched to breaking point everyday. There are a lot of reasons for this but some of them are easy to see. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have been called to patients who aren’t really patients at all. They are desperately in need of help,  but not medical help. They need social care. Or social housing. They need their basic needs to be met,  but they do not really need an ambulance,  it’s just that there is no one else that they can call on a Sunday afternoon when they are at the end of their tether. When the loneliness hits hard and the prospect of not seeing a friendly face for another week is more than they can bear.  Or when caring for their loved one just becomes too heavy a burden to carry for another day, another night.  When they are desperate for a little bit of respite from the ceaseless pressure of responsibility for an old or dying loved one.

In the past this would have been dealt with, perhaps, by ringing another family member, or by a carer or a respite centre to give the family a break.  These days though, families are spread far apart and so with cuts to Local Authority budgets meaning that social care has been decimated,  there is no one to call. There is no relief, no respite in sight for a lot of these people; and so, in desperation, they call an ambulance.  And, in turn, because the ambulance crew can see that the family cannot cope, that it’s just too much,  we have no choice. We take them to hospital in the hope that given a few hours of space the family feel better, more able to continue in the thankless task of caring. We put a sticking plaster over society’s failure. 

And so there goes a hospital bed. A nurse,  a doctor, all of who’s time is taken up, instead of looking after the sick. And there goes that ‘protected’ NHS budget. The one that the government has pledged to increase. Only it’s not really an increase or protected at all, because now, instead of the money being spent on social care, and coming out of local authority budgets, it is coming out of the NHS one. The one that we hold so dear. And all the while the NHS covers up this deficit elsewhere, the worse it will get.

Then there are the lost souls. Those who drift, who sofa surf or sleep on park benches. Many of them mentally unwell but not acutely so; they don’t need a hospital, they just need somewhere to be warm; to be safe. Again there is no reason for them to be taken to hospital, but where else is there for them to go?  It takes a cold hearted person to leave a person on a park bench when you know they have nowhere else to go and it is minus 3 centigrade outside. And so yet again we, the ambulance crew, paid for by the NHS spend our time and your money phoning around charities, forgotten contacts in our patients phone, in the hope that we can find them a warm bed for the night. And if not, due to cuts in social housing, there being by no easy access hostels, we take them to the warm waiting room of the hospital.  And as we sit there sticking plasters on the plight of the homeless, another cardiac arrest call goes unanswered. Another person dies. 

Other patients are just too old; their bodies far too weak.  Sometimes it happens slowly, other times it is quick.  I recently went to a patient who was nearly 100 years old and barely lucid.  Struggling to even open his eyes; despite that, there was nothing significantly wrong with him; if I had to hazard a guess (and as I am helping to treat we have to do an educated one), I’d probably say it was just his time to go.  His body was just worn out.  He was nearly 100! But his daughter insisted he had been fine until he got pneumonia previously and was taken in hospital for a month.  Obviously the hospital had made him ill; before that he had been fine. Before that he had lived alone; was fine. There was no point telling her that maybe it was just his time to go.  That he had lived longer than most people, that the hospital that she was blaming by for the state of her father, probably was to blame, only not in the way that she thought; because years ago, her dad wouldn’t have been taken to hospital to be treated for the pneumonia, that nearly killed him. He would likely have just died. At home. Peacefully in his bed. Instead we dragged him off to A & E,  for more interventions. To prolong his life further such that it is.  And when he isn’t restored back to full health, no doubt his daughter will claim that the hospital killed him.  Because blame, it would seem is easier than the truth; that sometimes we just need to allow people to die.  Not play God and attempt miracles. We all have to die sometime. We all, as individuals and the NHS just need to learn to let them. 

The NHS cannot put a sticking plaster on the whole of society. As an ambulance crew friend once told me: if you just need a plaster, you don’t need us. 

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33 Reasons. 

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Emotions, Life

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We have fundamentally been doing it all wrong. Our approach has been flawed. We need a change in our justice system and it needs to happen soon. We are putting often the most vulnerable people in our society into places where they can never be expected to change, to thrive. We need to rehabilitate these children, these adults, not induct them into a life of unending criminality. We need to ensure that they are given opportunities for education, for employment, for change. To rehabilitate. 

Obviously for a few this may not be possible but for most it is. 

Our justice system should be less about just banging people up, and more about rehabilitation, re-education. It makes sense, and it’s about time that we stop keep saying it, and actually started to do something that will begin to achieve it. A shake up of prisons and children’s custody, away from just punishment, moving toward change. Hope, education; rehabilitation.  

I know this absolutely. I know this because I have experienced it. From both sides of the fence; as a criminal, a habitual offender who found herself locked up in one of these establishments; and also, perhaps uniquely as one of those who has the keys, literally, to assisting in that rehabilitation. 

If we were to meet today, I would introduce myself as Kate, a successful career woman. A mother of 3 with ambitions and goals and a plan as to how to achieve them. You would see a smartly dressed, probably crazy haired, confident woman, literally holding the keys to a prison in my hands. 

Had I met you 11 years ago it would have been a very different story. I would have likely been introduced to you as a prisoner within that very same prison. A heroin addict, with 33 criminal convictions; shoplifting, theft, possession of class A drugs. 26 years old, weighing 5.5 stone, I would have looked a very different person to the one I am today. 
In my early teens I began to take drugs and swiftly found myself  with a heroin addiction. Crime was my way of life and I was a repeat offender, with no hope of anything really, certainly not of ever living. 
At the age of 25, after 33 convictions I finally wound up in prison, just for a few weeks, but I was lucky. In those few weeks I was nurtured and helped and I found an idiom of peace. A snippet of chance that things could be different. I was offered respite from the continual drudgery of crime, and drug taking and I glimpsed a different life. 

I volunteered to help people. I optimised Big Society. I helped set up a charity and I found work. I got a degree and my life continued in an upward trajectory. Today I find myself responsible for the substance misuse needs of large groups of vulnerable people; adults and children. I run a budget of many millions a year. I hold keys to the prison I was once locked up in. I am rehabilitation personified. 

So it absolutely pains me to tell you that whilst rehabilitation is the key to changing lives for the better, there is a fundamental flaw. People in the UK today cannot be rehabilitated and move forward, away from their pasts. They can absolutely be rehabilitated, but there is no point in rehabilitating them because, as it stands they can never be seen to have changed. Their past haunts them like a shadow in the night; threatening at any point to pull it all away. I know this because I have experienced it myself. 

Part of my recovery and rehabilitation has been to help others. I went to university, I got a degree and a post graduate certificate, I gained a teaching qualification, sharing what I have learnt with others. I spend my days demanding the best services for the patients within prisons that I am responsible for. I trained as a first aider and gave up my weekends setting up and then volunteering on an SOS bus,  helping those who were drunk or ill, making sure they were safe. I followed on from this by training as an Emergency Care Assistant and working one day a week on frontline ambulances. I love it, I’m good at it. So you can imagine my devastation when I suddenly found out that I wasn’t able to do a job that I love, might not be able to again.  The reason? A renewed DBS check which this time (not sure how they missed it last time) they had seen my 11-20 year old criminal convictions. Never mind that I have a demonstrable track record, much more recent, of being a stand up citizen. Never mind that in my full time job I hold a position of significant responsibility. Never mind that I regularly walk in and out of the prisons that I am responsible for using the keys I am trusted to hold. No; convictions, from what feels to me like another life, indeed are from over a decade ago appeared to supersede it all. I can no longer work in a job that I am good at, that I love, because I made bad decisions at 13 years of age. 

And so whilst I wholeheartedly agree that rehabilitation needs to happen, that can work, the sad truth is that society is not currently set up to see it that way. We rehabilitate people and then cut them off at the knees when they try to apply for any decent job, because employers don’t see the rehabilitation. They don’t see that someone has desisted from reoffending because they have changed; what they see is a six page long DBS check giving them 33 reasons not to employ that rehabilitated ex offender. 

And so whilst I believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, I think that we are in danger of setting people up to fail if we don’t address the issue of how we recognise that rehabilitation as a society. People can change, but only if we let them. 

So many choices. 

13 Saturday Feb 2016

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One extra hot, one shot, small, skinny, latte please; there are five decisions to make just to order my favourite coffee. That’s how I like it, add a sachet of sugar and it’s just about perfect. I do have to wonder however if it is a good thing to be able to have so many choices to make over something as simple as a coffee. Especially when I’m in the queue at Costa behind a queue of equally demanding coffee drinkers, whilst the barista is run ragged making up ever more complicated orders. I notice in Starbucks you can now pick which continent you would like your coffee beans to come from. Even I’m not that fussy!! 

Growing up there was a choice of black or white coffee. Occasionally, if you were lucky you might be offered a filter or instant but normally it was the latter. I remember it being the height of sophistication to go to Wimpy with my Mum to have a “frothy coffee”. 

It seems standard nowadays to be able to personalise pretty much anything…put an address in your sat nav and you might have to choose between the shortest route, the longest, the fastest; do you want to avoid tolls, or maybe you would prefer to totally avoid main roads? 

Even posting a letter is complicated; working out the sizes and the difference between signed for, tracked and special delivery requires a diploma at least, maybe even a degree; with honours! 

Picking a school for your children had become a trauma beyond most people’s comprehension. It begins with picking childcare, do you get a childminder, send the kids to a playgroup, a Montessori nursery, or a standard nursery. Then you have to pick a school. Do you want a church school, an academy, a voluntary controlled school, a state school, a primary school or an infants school? Perhaps a church school would fit your child (and you) better? It moves on to secondary; sports academy, or science? Grammar or high school?The lists go on and on. Gone are the days when you went to the local school. Nowadays there are so many elements to consider that it makes my head hurt. My poor befuddled brain struggles to make sense of it all and the differences between them. 

The same happens when you try to buy a phone, do you want an iPhone, a Samsung, Nokia or a Motorola? Android, IOS 9 or Windows? Which provider? There are so many to choose from.

There used to be 4 TV channels, now we can pick from hundreds. Sometimes the stress of it all means I just switch it off. 

Some of the reasons we have so many choices are good; I currently have choice of 5 different bins for my waste: food waste bin, paper recycling, plastics and glass recycle bin, general waste, and garden waste. Whilst being complicated it makes sense that we can’t keep chucking everything into landfill, we need to recycle wherever we can, however it doesn’t help to keep things simple! 

Even mundane things have so many choices. I’m pretty sure my washing machine has at least 50 different cycles I can choose from. The result? I use one; the same one each time. I know where I am with that wash! 

Do we really need all these choices? Was the world that bad when we went to the local school along with 95% of the kids we grew up with?  Or when there was only a choice between watching The Waltons on a Sunday morning or going outside to play?

Is it any wonder then that so many of us are stressed and anxious all of the time? Under pressure to constantly make a choice, the right choice, often without fully understanding all of the options we are choosing between (especially in the case of phones, or is that just me)? 

Is the world that much better because I can choose between 120 different ways to make my coffee? We live in a world full of people living constantly in the angst of maybe making a bad choice, the wrong decision, getting it wrong. Whilst it might seem a small thing to pick out a coffee, when you add up all those small decisions that we make everyday it starts to get mind blowing. It’s hard enough to make big decisions let along to constantly have to make choices about what, in the grand scheme of things are relatively trivial. 

Just because we can have so many options available to us doesn’t mean we should always consider offering them. 

Still it’s nice to know that those other 49 wash cycles are there if I need them…

In 5 years. 

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Life

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It’s one of those questions that parents ask their children whether they are 3 years old or 25 years old; “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Actually it may start off as as that but gradually, over the years, it might change to be said in a more accusing tone, with the implication that person being asked is somehow whittling away their life. That they should know by now, should be working towards it. 

It’s asked in a different form at job interviews “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” And the expectation is that you will have a plan, a route forward, marked out with incremental markers along the way; earn more; work less hours; get a promotion; run the company. 

I’ve always thought that it was an extremely difficult question to answer. It’s also one full of pit falls. What if I say I want to be running my own business, earning lots of money and yet in reality in 5 years I’m still in the same job that I’ve been in since I left school, because I actually quite like it and it suits my lifestyle. Have I somehow failed at life? 

What if I say I want to get a degree in maths, and I enrol and then halfway through I realise that it’s just not adding up for me? That I’m bored, that I’ve changed my mind, actually I rather fancy doing anything, as long as it doesn’t involve me having to do sums? Am I a drop out? A failure? Or have I just decided that for me failing would be sticking at doing something that I hate, in order to fulfil everyone’s expectations of my answer to a question I answered 2 years ago, in a different time, a different place? 

 The past few months I’ve had more than one reason to look at what I want to do in relation to work, I love my job but sometimes I despair of it. I wonder if I could do something else, but one thing is for sure; if anyone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer wouldn’t have been the job I do now. Not because I couldn’t imagine doing the job I do now, but because I didn’t even know it existed. Or the job I had before that. Or the one before that. 

Why can we not just see where life takes us? What’s wrong with trying a few career pathways/lifestyles before we find the one that suits us? And why does it have to be one thing? I currently have two jobs, both very different from each other but both I love. They fulfill me in different ways. Neither would I ever have put myself in as a child, nor 5 years ago. We are under pressure from such a young age to plan and know what we are going to be/do when we grow up, but surely that’s just limiting ourselves? Sometimes there’s nothing like waiting to see where life takes us, because inevitably life takes us on the path it chooses, not the route we planned aged 3.