Anyone who has an elderly parent will already be well aware of the pressures on hospital emergency departments, especially at this time of year.
We had many trips there when my mother was alive. They were always the same. A long wait sitting on an uncomfortable chair before she was assessed as needing a bed.
Then came the interminable wait for one to become available – usually in the early hours of the morning. And after usually only one night in a bed, to stabilise her, she was back to her care home.
The same scenes were repeated on television news all last week. Hard-pressed staff, queues of ambulances outside and patients – many of them elderly – crowded into corridors.
It’s the same every year, and appears to be getting worse. The only thing that has changed is the name – from casualty, to A&E, and now it’s ED.
Once upon a time, there was a trial system where elderly people could be referred by their GP direct to a department at the City Hospital, where they were triaged and found a bed in a reasonable time.
We were only able to avail of it once as it was discontinued. Why?
It’s no clearer to me than the absurd system that has ambulance crews hanging around hospital corridors with the patients they’ve brought there, instead of being able to return to the streets to answer more urgent calls.
No doubt this is why the distraught mother of critically ill Brian Rooney had to drive him to hospital in her own car, only for him to collapse at the entrance when his heart stopped.
Meanwhile the Bengoa report on reforming the health service here gathers dust on the shelves.
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Another one gathering dust is the £800,000 report on flags, identity, culture and tradition which Paula Bradshaw is gamely trying to get movement on.
She wants to see a regulatory framework because she is constantly fielding complaints from her constituents about the proliferation of flags.
Naturally this brought the knee-jerk response from the TUV that she’s spearheading an attack on unionist culture, because they seem to need their sense of Britishness reinforced by red, white and blue or Ulster flags, however tattered, hanging from lampposts and civic buildings.
Of course they deny that the displays, which go well past the two-month marching season, have anything to do with intimidation, or that they are put up beside new housing estates to make it clear who isn’t welcome in a particular area.
But then many unionists have trouble in recognising what’s plain as a pikestaff to everyone else
Many of us might tolerate flags if they were taken down by September after what the late queen described as the “silly marching business” is over for the year.
If it is really about tolerance of culture, then I’m sure the TUV would be equally happy with Irish tricolours at Easter, wouldn’t they?
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Next year, if, as my mother would say, God spares me, I might forgo Christian tradition and follow the Orthodox church by celebrating Christmas in January.
It’s nothing to do with religion, just the belief that the weather goes all Christmassy then, just when everything is already gloomy and all the trees and decorations are packed away for another year.
I may not be alone. Our local recycling centre said they’d had very few trees brought in for the chipper after January 6, as they were, like ours, still in good nick, so people were keeping them up for longer.
I recall a trip to Paris one year when Christmas trees and festive lights were still in evidence in early February.
We can do Santa and the turkey on December 25, but let’s make the festive season last for another month, or maybe until Valentine’s Day?
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If Trump’s chum, Elon Musk, is so keen on colonising Mars, might I suggest he sends Donald Junior there to try it out and leave Greenland alone?
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