“No patient should die on a trolley in indignity": Doctor reveals how underfunding NHS leads to miserable deaths
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On the busy palliative care ward where she works, Dr Rachel Clarke is thinking of her father, who died at Christmas.
“In the days before he died, dad told me how proud of me he was for standing up for the NHS ,” the campaigning doctor says.
Caring for patients at the end of their lives has become harder in the weeks following her father Dr Mark Rendall’s death, each dying face carrying his echo. But it has also made Rachel even more committed to keep alive the health service to which Dr Rendall dedicated his life.
“If we feel angry and distressed that people are dying in corridors, and pensioners are dying at home waiting for an ambulance, we need to do something,” Rachel says.
“We need to join the march on Saturday to support the NHS.
“The NHS has been underfunded for seven years to the point where it can’t even keep patients alive because it doesn’t have enough resources. We have to speak out politically in every way we can. If the Government thinks it can keep getting away with this level of underfunding, it will – and more people will die.”
(Image: Getty)
As a doctor who works in end-of-life care, Rachel is deeply affected by the stories of patients not afforded the calm, tender, private death of her father.
“No patient should die on a trolley in indignity, with people walking by,” she says.
“Nine years ago, when I started out, patients were not dying on trolleys. It was extremely rare to use corridor beds. But the last seven years have seen the NHS subjected to the worst cuts in 70 years.”
Rachel, whose bestselling memoir Your Life in My Hands laid bare the pressures of the underfunded NHS, says nurses desperately need a rise.
“The NHS is haemorrhaging 10% of nurses a year,” she says. “There are 40,000 nursing gaps. We need a pay rise for our underpaid nurses now, so they don’t need to go to foodbanks.
“Having too few staff already means daily working life is extremely tough.
(Image: Adam Gerrard/Daily Mirror)
“Nurses think, ‘why am I putting myself through this every day for a salary where I’m not even confident I can put food on the table?”
Rachel is troubled by the plight of Hadiza Bawa-Garba, the former trainee doctor struck off last week for mistakes that led to the death of Jack Adcock, who had Down’s syndrome and a heart condition.
Rachel, and many other doctors behind a crowd-funding appeal, believe Jack’s death may have been caused by dangerous gaps in the staffing rota that led to Bawa-Garba, a trainee, doing three doctors’ jobs that day.
“That poor little boy died in unforgivable circumstances,” Rachel says. “But would Jack Adcock still be alive if there hadn’t been grotesque underfunding that led to gaps in the doctor and nursing staff that day? Even one doctor’s workload is exhausting. If rota gaps mean one trainee is doing three doctors’ jobs, every patient is in danger.”
She says her husband, a pilot formerly in the RAF, is appalled by NHS understaffing.
“He says that if he turned up to fly a plane and there was no co-pilot, the plane wouldn’t take off,” she says.
“I told him it’s worse than that, often I am pilot, co-pilot, doing the trolley service and wiping baby sick off the front row.”
(Image: Getty)
The NHS Rachel is fighting for is human as well as efficient. “I never want to be employed by Virgin . None of us does. I want to work on in a public-service-provided NHS, not Richard Branson ’s NHS,” she says.
Rachel’s dad was an anaesthetist in the Navy before becoming a GP.
“A traditional old school family doctor, a real cradle-to-grave GP,” she says. “He was devoted to his patients, some of whom came to his funeral. When you just use the metric of efficiency and the bottom line, that way of doing things looks outdated. But how do you measure being known?”
The morning after her father died, Rachel sent a tweet of thanks to the NHS for the “£zero” price tag of his wonderful care. “Grief, pain, emptiness – but not bankruptcy,” she wrote. “Thank you, thank you #NHS”.
The tweet reached nine million people, many of whom shared their own positive NHS experiences. But replies that came from the United States often told of the bills that came with bereavement.
“I lost my dad to cancer a little over a year ago in the USA,” one reply said. “He was prevented from chemo because of money.”
That message is a reminder for all of us of what’s at stake right now in our country.