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Well there you have it. A new Prime Minister, a new (if slightly confused) government, and – following on from my last column – a new Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore. Thirteen years of hard work from Tim Briggs, Medical Director at the RNOH, in trying to wrest the necessary money from the DoH to rebuild the dilapidated hospital, have finally paid off.
Indeed, London Eye understands that the Labour Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, went to the hospital in person in April to pledge the money necessary for the rebuild. And Tory man Andrew Lansley, who has replaced Burnham, has promised to honour this pledge. Clearly, none of the political parties could stomach the prospect of an orthopaedic surgeon running for parliament (this was what Professor Briggs threatened to do if his hospital did not receive the funding) – and who, some might say, can blame them?!
"Let’s just hope that Mr Lansley doesn’t channel any of the new government’s health budget away from Stanmore into buying more wheelclamps for hospitals"
Seriously though, congratulations are due to all involved – this is a victory not only for British orthopaedics, and for specialist hospitals from all disciplines, but also for the medical profession as a whole, as it tries desperately to retain some sort of autonomy and self-control in the murky medico-political world of the early twenty-first century.
It seems that one bunch of people who probably don’t share London Eye’s regard for orthopods, or indeed surgeons as a whole, are the physicians running the medical school in Brighton. Students there sit their finals in two halves; surgery comes in January, and only if you pass that do you get to sit medicine in the summer before heading off to be a foundation doctor. Apparently, however, students are told that the final year begins with ‘some easy stuff, before lifting the benchmark ready for the proper exams’.
No wonder it’s hard to persuade some of these graduates from the ‘new’ medical schools of the worth of coming into surgery. Conversely, if you want to see a specialist hospital where the surgeons are certainly in no doubt whatsoever about their own worth, it’s the rather splendid and famous hospital at East Grinstead, where plastic surgery came into being, and indeed still has its spiritual home in many ways. London Eye was amused to hear of one particular plastic consultant there who recently drove to work and parked in a limited parking zone, only to find on finishing his operating list that the car had been clamped. He took a taxi home and drove back the next day in his second car, parking it next to the first where it, too, was clamped.
So it continued until on the fifth day, the hospital parking attendants were ready and waiting for him, clamp in hand. ‘Why do you keep parking here when you know you will be clamped?’ they asked him. To which he replied, ‘I know for a fact that you only have five wheelclamps, and I have six cars.’ Let’s just hope for his sake that Mr Lansley doesn’t channel any of the new government’s health budget away from Stanmore into buying more wheelclamps for hospitals.
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