I have been sent a cutting from an Irish newspaper with a suggestion that it might serve as an example of a more robust style of reporting that Cornish journalists – including me – should follow.
I thought, in fact, that I was a pretty outspoken chap with a reputation for pulling no punches, but I have to say that Irish newspaper columnist Terry McGeehan makes me look like a pussy cat.
The column forwarded to me is headed “These gobshites must go” and it names the “organised gang of heartless, gutless, spineless and brainless incompetents and cowards” who – among a long list of other misdeeds – put the lives of Irish people at risk in dodgy hospitals.
The Irish Prime Minister was lambasted for “failing miserably to give us the so-called ‘envy of Europe’ health service that was promised to us three elections ago.”
Well, I say. I have called politicians a few things in my time, but I have never dared to label them as “gormless gobshites masquerading as the government ...”
Maybe I should. Maybe if newspaper columnists like myself named and shamed those responsible for mismanaging our public services more often, Britain wouldn’t be languishing so far behind other countries in the World Health Organisation’s league of healthcare systems.
It’s astonishing to note that Spain – which was regarded as almost a Third World country at the time the British NHS was first launched – is now further up the healthcare league than us.
Everyone in Cornwall knows that our local hospital services don’t even rank well against others in the UK, so God knows how they compare with the rest of the world.
We have superb doctors and nurses in Cornwall but they are starved of the resources to run a decent service. As I have pointed out before, Cornish healthcare managers still haven’t complied with government promises to stop putting male and female patients side by side in the same wards. Older patients in particular find it distressing and humiliating to have to lay in bed next to strangers of the opposite sex and it is disgraceful that the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust continues to stubbornly ignore Government advice to end this practice.
I am prompted to hark on about this again not just because I have seen how an Irish columnist deals with incompetence, but because of an incident that happened in a mixed sex ward at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night.
A male patient went berserk in the middle of the night, knocking over medical equipment and terrifying other sick people, including an elderly lady who had undergone major surgery just 24 hours earlier.
Security guards had to be called to restrain the patient and remove him from the ward but not before lives were put at risk and other sick people were left in a highly distressed state.
It is, of course, appalling that medical staff who are employed to cure the sick are so often faced these days with violence from the very people they are trying to help but it is even worse for fellow patients.
Just imagine how awful it must have been for this elderly lady – confined to bed, tubes protruding from every orifice and wires connecting her to electronic gadgets – as she watched the madman in the bed next to her run riot.
I’m not really sure what a gobshite is – my dictionary doesn’t list the word – but I’m convinced it’s an appropriate description of the person responsible for continuing to put men and women side by side in the same wards in Cornish hospitals.