It’s Wednesday and yet again I am on a train!

I have spent the morning in hospital at Barts . 900 years old hospital ,, which is beside the still operating market known as Smithfield. I have visions of my late mother -in -law hat and apron, theatre sister in her day!

Today though the 900 year old chapel and Henry 8th passage…are still standing. I mean the gateway not his back passage. Obviously.

Where was I ? oh yes parts of Bart’s are modernised and look very cool. Today was the first day of the difficult asthma patient biologic. It’s an injection. In hospital. Monthly. I had to stay awhile in case of reaction. So far so good I seem ok and am on the way home. NHS at its best. I am indeed grateful.

Last night I was at Luton and Dunstable, again. Some of my wires had broken. Mr Max fax had to redo the teeth wiring thing and got a bit carried away doing a bit of lower jaw too. Who is that character in Bond movies? The teeth one. …argh?

Meanwhile , mum has frustratingly missed a call from Oxford Churchill Hospital. She is understandably in a panic. Surely they could have left a message. Or rung me. Or rung again. I have rung and emailed every number I can find on the website. Let’s hope it was just a call about the appointment they’d sent out.

My MRI report is sitting in my thoughts. It is not going away. I hope that by the time all the NHS teams return from annual leave we can try and find the answers. The thing is, we want to trust the surgeons, nurses, physicians who care for us. But we just don’t and the horrific story emerging from Cheshire adds to the mistrust. It would seem to me, but what do I know, that the managers in these trusts hold such power, wield such sticks and threats that any whistleblower is threatened with loss of employment. Look at Peter Duffy who wrote Whistle in the Wind. He lost his job because he reported a colleague. I think it is Malcolm Gladwell who points out that airlines encourage reporting of faults. Fix them and move on. No blame assignment and incredible passenger safety records prevail.

A letter in todays’ Times:The obsession with cultural equality and workplace fairness in the NHS, particularly among senior managers, has led to a workforce too frightened to raise safety concerns, because doing so would be more likely to lead to their own suspension than to any meaningful safety action. I ( the writer of this letter)was brought into the NHS by Jeremy Hunt, then the health secretary, to see if a sprinkling of aviation safety dust might yield a reduction in avoidable harm. Instead I found roadblocks at every step of the journey, most disappointingly from the senior leadership of NHS England. A system that is brimming with data is undermined by those who cannot countenance introducing safety systems that have been tried and successfully tested by other high-risk sectors. If seven murders and more than 10,000 avoidable deaths each year cannot change this thinking, we are indeed in a very sad place.
Keith Conradi
Former chief investigator, Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch; Farnham, Surrey. Accessed Times Newspapers 23 August 2023

This resonates with a programme board I worked on last year. A small amount was paid to we PPI, for the hours and hours we 3 patients spent with Mr NHS manager. But when we did not agree with his plans, when we asked to see his report, which we had co-authored, when we suggested changes to an agenda. He fired off extremely rude emails to us, and eventually sacked us all. Mmm I’m beginning to realise that maybe normal.