Jackie Danicki

Jo’s wife, Victoria, is in hospital right this second, preparing to give birth to their first child. I am excited for them to the point of distraction.

Vic is a diabetic, and from Jo I just learned one more infuriating way our National Heath Service kills people.

A couple of years ago, [Vic] was admitted to hospital the night before a minor operation so that she could be put on a glucose drip — you have to fast before being given a general anaesthetic, but fasting, obviously, is dangerous for diabetics, so they get brought into hospital the previous day so they can be given a glucose drip and have their blood sugars controlled without eating. This is entirely sensible. On being admitted, Vic was faced with a ward nurse who refused to give her the glucose drip on the grounds, when you get down to it, that she thought she knew better than the surgeon, the anaestetist, and the diabetic consultant, and it was her opinion that mattered because she, unlike them, was there. The drip was the only reason Vic was even in hospital — were it not for that requirement, she wouldn’t have come in till the following morning. So the nurse in charge refused to give her the only thing she was in hospital to receive. The next morning, unsurprisingly (to us), Vic had a hypoglycaemic attack — ideal preparation for an operation. I’d love to say that this experience was a one-off, but it wasn’t. It’s the norm.

The refusal to allow diabetic patients to administer their own insulin has led to at least two deaths in Northern Ireland alone.

Luckily, Vic’s doctor has a special arrangement with all of the nurses and midwives at the hospital where she will give birth: they are all under strict instructions to let his patients administer their own insulin. As Jo says, that’s great - for his patients, who happen to live in the right postcode and so have a more enlightened doctor (who would probably get in trouble with the bureaucrats if his special arrangement was discovered).

This is how the NHS works: thanks to her address, Vic’s chances of surviving next week are slightly higher, and her chances of not being a victim of negligence or malpractice are much higher. All the diabetics in our area who simply accepted that reorganisation when they were told about it — that’s probably most of them — do not have that advantage.

…I don’t know the details of those two deaths, or of the other deaths in other parts of the UK brought about by the same NHS policy. Maybe the patients were asleep, or senile, or delirious, or otherwise unaware. Or maybe they knew that the dose they were about to be given would kill them, and so kicked up a stink, and appealed for a diabetes specialist to give a second opinion, and did all they could to stop it happening, and were calmly and professionally overruled and sedated so that the nurses could get on with their job.

Well, they do have politicians’ quotas to meet…We must prioritise, and the priorities of the government and the NHS bureaucrats are quite clear. Patients just get in the way. (NB A friend’s uncle died two days ago during routine knee surgery - for a rugby injury - at an NHS hospital. The family has asked for an autopsy to investigate what looks like the needless death of a healthy man.)

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