“There’s no business like snow business”, says the sign above theatre reception. It’s certainly very bad for business, and we’ve all just about had enough now.
One or two days building igloos in the back garden may be fun, but now things are getting out of hand. The supermarket shelves are empty as panic-buyers fight over the last baguette, the streets of Hale and Wilmslow are littered with abandoned BMWs, and local radio broadcasts lists of all the schools which are closed even though there hasn’t been any actual snow now for two days.
“Those teachers - how much holiday do they want?” I ask my husband. I think I catch the words “Health & Safety”, but they were a bit muffled by the duvet.
Meanwhile those of us with jobs on the frontline have to struggle in to work. On Tuesday, we had the deepest snow that Manchester has seen for 30 years.
The hospital was on red alert and all elective surgery was cancelled. There goes our non-clinical cancellation target, for a start. In one day we cancelled more operations than we normally do in two months.
There were many tales of heroic efforts to come to work - my lead ODP (a cycling fanatic) ran 13 miles to work. Gridlock was so bad that one colleague sat for four hours with nothing to do but a Sudoku (not unlike his usual neurosurgical list, he commented). One of my recovery nurses laid all her spare clothes behind the car wheels in order to get off the drive.
Altogether, we managed to keep the emergency service going and a consultant colleague volunteered to be resident overnight. Many nursing staff stayed in local hotels rather than risk the journey home - although, once they’d seen the inside of the local hotels (they have interesting plumbing, I’m told) they probably quite fancied the idea of three hours through black ice.
Needless to say, we did have some other members of staff for whom getting to work wasn’t quite such a high priority, including some who lived within walking distance of the hospital but appeared to be snowed into their beds.
Now that the acute emergency is over (for the moment at least) and the blitz spirit has dissipated somewhat, we are in the midst of bitter recrimination. Those who tried to come in on Tuesday but were unable to make it are outraged at the suggestion that they should be docked a day’s annual leave, whereas those who heroically came into work don’t see why their colleagues should get an extra day off. Those who just stayed in bed are keeping their heads down.
There’s fresh disaster today - ice has prevented the bins being emptied. My elderly neighbour is outraged. “We had a worse winter in 1947 and everything carried on as normal”, he tells me. Events this week demonstrate the pathetic lack of backbone and work ethic of today’s youth, government and society in general.
Perhaps the fact that in 1947 there were only two cars on the road, everyone walked to work and kept hens in the back garden might have had something to do with it. Incidentally, hospitals only carried out three operations a week, and hadn’t just outsourced their sterilising units to Liverpool. Oh for those simple days…
Tags: Workforce
I trudged for three miles though the icy wastelands of the East Midlands, defying a blood curdling blizzard, to reach the hospital…only to find I wasn’t on call after all. Doh!
Anyone seen any comments in the Daily Mail about the heroic efforts made by NHS staff to get to work and keep our hospitals open? Me neither.
However, we did see paeans (? sp) of praise heaped on the heads of teachers who eventually decided to go back to work this week so that the kids could do their exams. One chap, clearly destined for sainthood, had gone to work as early as 5.00 am to get the heating on etc. At least he’ll have his six week summer holiday to get over it all.
At our hospital, the whole team including 3 surgeons, theatre staff and ITU staff made it in through the snow for an aneursym repair as did the patient - a man in his 80s travelling from 25 miles away. Sadly the anaesthetist 6 miles away was ’snowed’ in. Undeterred the surgical registrar was sent in the car to pick up the anaesthetist and persuade them to come to work rather than build a snowman in the back garden