Special Treatment

“Does that mean you’re going to get a lot of money?” enquired my 13-year-old son as he scanned the headline in the evening paper: “Telly’s Leslie wins £500K (sic) MRSA award – Record NHS payout for actress”. “I’m afraid not,” I replied tersely. He wasn’t surprised.

“Is it just me, or is that outrageous?” I asked a friend the following day. Imagine my feelings when he told me that the story I read had left a nought off, and that the payout was actually £5m. Curiously, it didn’t fan my sense of outrage. It just left me feeling rather disgusted and depressed.

The illness has clearly blighted the actress’s life. But despite having endured an experience myself of being admitted to hospital and things then going horribly wrong, I find I have a stubborn lack of sympathy or fellow-feeling. Why is that, I ask myself?

It’s partly because my own experience of MRSA was such a non-event – a completely innocuous skin infection cleared by a few of smears of cream in its most recent manifestation (see my blog Return of the Superbug). Even when I contracted it post-operatively five years ago, I would never have known I had it if the doctors hadn’t told me. There were no symptoms as such, and it was treated with intravenous antibiotics that had no discernible impact on my condition. I did notice the pneumonia that I contracted, probably as a result of having MRSA, but even that was pretty small beer compared with the raging fever and massive stomach haemorrhage that landed me at death’s door in Intensive Care and required 45 units of blood in transfusions over one tumultuous weekend to replace what I had lost.

So I find it mildly bewildering when people ask me in disbelief “You’ve had MRSA then?” I’ve done a number of photo-shoots for the press over the past week to promote my forthcoming book, and that is the question that every photographer has raised – usually in a tone of awed amazement that I am still alive. I feel a bit of a fraud when I shrug it off as having been the least of my worries.

Still, the mythology that surrounds the disease has served Leslie Ash well – even if she actually caught the strain of staphylococcus aureus that does respond to most antibiotics. She has clearly suffered far more radical effects than me of her hospital-acquired infection. But when the average payout for breast cancer blunders is £25,000 – and some women have died or been comparably damaged as a result of these – her award does seem to represent special treatment.

That’s also true if you compare it to other awards made to MRSA victims. The award-winning TV documentary a couple of years ago A Dirty Weekend in Hospital featured a host of people who had suffered hugely distressing consequences from having had the disease, but apparently Leslie Ash’s payout is equal to the total of all the payouts to MRSA cases in the period 2004-6. Her lawyers have argued that this reflects the scale of her lost earnings, but having worked as a TV drama producer for many years and knowing well the kind of fees that different actors can command, I cannot help feeling that the payout reflects an extremely generous or optimistic assessment of these.

The other thing that grates for me are the circumstances that landed Leslie Ash in hospital in the first place. Apparently she was admitted with a punctured lung and two broken ribs after an “energetic sex session” with her husband. What the couple get up to in private is entirely their own affair, but when it ends with one of them in hospital seeking help and that person then contracts an infection (which is always a risk when you go to hospital), it seems a bit rich that the rest of us end up having to foot a massive bill in consequence.

This is a dangerous line of argument, because it begs the question of where you draw the line when accidents might be considered to be people’s own fault. Are you less deserving of sympathy or recompense because you were hospitalized as result of a skiing accident or bungee-jump? Because of a car-crash or from smoking?

I don’t think the issue would arise if this payout had been on a more moderate or “normal” scale. But when £5m is being taken out of the health service, which will deprive others of treatment, it is hard not to entertain such thoughts. One of the underlying principles of the NHS is of people’s right to be treated more or less equally when confronted with ill-health. By agreeing to this immense award, the NHS managers, or their insurers, are bowing to the celebrity culture that so bedevils our society, and rubbing our noses in the fact that, sadly, the system does not treat everyone the same.

The End of History

Last month the Royal Free Hospital re-named its wards. The historic titles were scrapped and replaced with functional labels that indicate the floor on which the ward is situated and the direction it faces. So Jex-Blake Ward, for instance, which was named after Sophia Jex-Blake, whose pioneering work in doctors’ training opened up the medical profession to women, became 12 South. The distinguished physicians and generous benefactors who shaped the hospital’s history are no longer to be part of its living fabric.

The Royal Free’s history is a particularly stirring and distinguished one. It was the first hospital in the country to offer free care to those who could not afford to pay for it. A hundred and twenty years before the NHS came into being, it established the principle that the only requirement for treatment was medical need. It was also the first hospital in England to offer clinical facilities to female medical students, without which they could not be properly trained. It thus laid the foundations for two of the fundamental precepts of contemporary healthcare in Britain, and it consequently seems a shame that Elizabeth Garrett Anderson – the first woman to qualify as a doctor in this country and also the inaugural Dean of the Royal Free Medical School – will no longer be associated with the hospital on a routine daily basis. The ward named after her is now known as 11 West.

But – sentiment aside – does this really matter? The re-naming is apparently intended to make it easier for emergency “crash” teams to find their way round the building, and also to make fewer demands on the literacy skills of the hospital’s patients. Quite apart from being fantastically condescending, however (are we seriously expected to believe that doctors able to perform life-saving resuscitation procedures are unable to locate a ward because it is identified by a name rather than a directional code?), I believe this change does undermine - in however small a way - the fundamental nature of the institution.

As I explain in my forthcoming book Shadows in Wonderland (to be published on 7 February – see www.hammersmithpress.co.uk) the Royal Free, like most modern hospitals, conforms to almost all of the criteria that the French academic Marc Augé uses to define “Non-Places” – the faceless environments such as airports, motorway service stations or supermarkets that form such a major part of the contemporary landscape, and from which we feel so painfully alienated. Prominent among these characteristics is the way that these environments deny the past: “There is no room for history...what reigns there is actuality, the urgency of the present moment.”

Writers such as George Orwell and Milan Kundera have tracked the ways in which totalitarian regimes eradicate and re-write history to suppress opposition or criticism, and legitimize their abuses of power. Conspiracy theorists might well see this “innocent” change of names at the Royal Free as part of a sinister, covert campaign to erase the past and move away from free, universal healthcare based on social and sexual equality towards a private, marketized system based on the ability to pay. From this perspective, the name of the hospital itself will be the next thing to change. Why remind us that hospitals once were free?

While I doubt the existence of such a coherent plan to dismantle the existing system, at a time when the future funding and nature of the NHS is being endlessly re-examined, I think it remains valuable to be constantly reminded that the compassionate inclusiveness and equality of hospitals today did not just happen by chance. They are the result of determined action by a host of committed and pioneering individuals over many years. It also does no harm to remember that many of the health service’s assets were not purchased by the state, but given for the public good by caring and enlightened benefactors. They are held in trust and not to be lightly “sold off” to balance the current balance-sheets.

Am I just an old codger who can’t bear change, or do others agree?