Our meeting on Wednesday 4 February 2015 was a discussion meeting on the “National Health Service and the Ambulance Service”, led by our member Mollie. But before we got to that excitement, there were the usual reports on those of our members and our friends battling with their own health, let alone the NHS!
One thing we learned in the discussion is that there is no shortage of information about the NHS and the Ambulance Service. There is also enough anecdotal data to fill several libraries – and that is just from our members! Mollie started the discussion off with a series of statistics broadcast in a recent BBC Panorama programme. One area of consensus concerned the shift experienced by many Accident and Emergency departments in hospitals. The shift seems to have been caused by a change of understanding that it is not so much Accident and Emergency these days as Accident or Emergency.
Whilst not having any surgeons or general practitioners in the club at the moment (please apply to our webmaster below if you are interested) we do have people with experience of working in the health service and pharmacological industries. We also learned that much seems to have changed also in the relationship between General Practitioner and Patient.
Sadly, dear Reader, we did not solve the problem; we did however collect a lot of anecdotal and statistical information!
