Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

I left home at seven-thirty in the morning and headed for Inverness Airport. My first flight of 2010 took me to the south of England. A hire car was pre-booked. I drove the twenty miles to the hospital with minus six on the temperature gauge and little evidence of road gritting. Consequentially I kept my speed to a minimum much to the annoyance of the traffic behind. Better an annoyingly slow driver than a dead one, eh? Although those behind may not have thought so. Excessive intolerance is a disturbingly human trait.

The hospital was a vast and oppressive complex devoid of architectural empathy. Car parking cost £1 an hour. Obviously a strategy to prevent unwelcome visitors from clogging up the hospital. A week of visiting my sick and elderly relative, I calculated, could swell the hospital coffers by a considerable amount. A sign announced that the meter was emptied regularly. But of course, for how else would they have space for the multitude of coins?

In an election year, I was about to experience a dose of the much talked about National Health Service with regard to care for our elderly citizens. The ward was dangerously under-staffed and the absence of welcoming smiles and human warmth evident. It become clear after a week that the medical bit, the injections and blood tests, were efficiently and clinically performed, the speed of drug administrations lightening fast with little time for idle chit chat and the expressions of staff more likely to be impassive than otherwise.

I am often told by my elderly gardening clients as I travel about Ross-shire that getting old is no fun and I can quite believe it, but to get old and to end up in a hospital ward for the elderly like this one has got to be the ultimate nightmare. Maybe I picked a particularly bad week. I hope so.

There were exceptions of course: the chatty Lithuanian girl dishing out the tea who found a moment to talk about nothing in particular with someone for whom it was important to talk about nothing in particular; the nurse who refused to separate work from the rest of her life and was able to treat anxious patients as valued individuals; the teenager with the sparkly stud through his ear who took time out for a chat between polishing the floors. That sort of thing, but in general the milk of human kindness was sadly lacking.

On reflection, it's interesting how meticulously we plan for the future, whether it's inheritance for the children, pension plans or holidays, but rarely fast forward to investigate what society has in store for us when we get old.

Presumably we think we will never get old. It's the Immortality Syndrome. We are immortal until, inexplicably, we are not. But we are born, we have a bit in the middle and inevitably we die - and when our time comes the last thing we want is some old misery looking after us, no, certainly not.

When the election finally materialises this year I shall vote for the party that injects a positive ethos into elderly care, interactions of a warming kind and a ray of sunshine. That's what is important.

So where is the humour in all of this, you may wonder? Well, this month I've decided that any reserves of humour and warmth should be temporarily transferred to the National Health Service to help them through the winter in the hope that when spring arrives they may re-discover it for themselves. I don't blame individuals for the lack of respect and dignity displayed to the old and vulnerable. It's a cultural thing, only it's about time we changed that, don't you think?

By the way, the patient is no longer in hospital and is making a slow and steady recovery in a friendlier environment. As for me, I may stand for election in 2010 and rattle a few cages. Why not? My election expenses might be cheaper than the car parking bills.

Copyright Patrick Vickery

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