Reality check: Thousands of women are NOT giving birth in hospital toilets! Are you stupid!?

Terrifying news from the guys and gals at the Daily Mail. An attention grabbing headline announces that: “bed shortages forces 4,000 mothers to give birth in lifts, offices and hospital toilets”.

Are you asking yourself what is this country coming to? You’re an idiot. This headline just screams bullshit. For one thing, most hospitals would tend to have more beds than lifts, suggesting that the elevator isn’t the preferred second choice amongst medical staff.

Delving into the article, they don’t even try to substantiate the claim, saying:

63 births in ambulances and 608 in transit to hospitals;
117 births in A&E departments, four in minor injury units and two in medical assessment areas;
115 births on other hospital wards and 36 in other unspecified areas including corridors;
399 in parts of maternity units other than labour beds, including postnatal and antenatal wards and reception areas.

Not too scary. Although they do ominously add:

Babies were born in offices, lifts, toilets and a caravan, according to the Freedom of Information data for 2007 and 2008 from 117 out of 147 trusts which provide maternity services.

How many though? One thousand? Two thousand? Or the four thousand you claim in the headline! They don’t say. Fortunately (before I school myself in midwifery to make up for the NHS’s obvious failings – the logical solution), The Guardian provided more statistics:

The 2008 figures reveal that as well as 1,548 unplanned home births, there were 333 births in transit to the hospital, 171 in an antenatal ward or area, 38 in an ambulance, 63 in A&E.

In addition, 26 births occurred on a postnatal ward, 11 in a maternity reception, 34 in a maternity ward other than a designated labour ward and 52 in other wards. A total of 22 births occurred in other parts of the hospital, one in a corridor and eight in a car park.

Call me underly sensationalist, but that seems more symptomatic of uncontrollable baby-spawning (what’s the scientific term for that?) than anything else.

At the heart of this particular issue, removing all the waffle, seems to be this: On 553 occasions in 2008, overstretched (under-resourced?) maternity units were not able to admit any more women in labour.

Who’s at fault here and what should be done about it, if anything? Discuss….

Thousands of Brits celebrate their granny-killing, evil, socialist euthanasia engine [NHS love]

I’ve been following the American healthcare pantomime with the usual morbid fascination I reserve for their insane media (you can include political leaders and citizens under that adjective for that matter). After a while, however, I started to be genuinely concerned that this madness is going to cost the non-crazy Americans a chance for real healthcare reform. Hmm… not so funny anymore.

And into this shitstorm was unfairly thrust the good ol’ NHS, better known across the pond as an evil and Orwellian socialist institution that would have let Stephen Hawking’s die, had he been cursed to be born British (I can understand the confusion; as Ricky Gervais said, born in Oxford but speaks with an American accent? Pretentious). Even worst, one of our own (meant very loosely) joined the attack. Tory MEP Dan Hannan tears into the NHS (on Fox News, no less!), seemingly lending weight to the nightmare perception of the British system. Mikeno12’s comment sums things up succinctly.

We weren’t going to put up with that shit. The #welovethenhs Twitter campaign mobilised us Brits to shout our support for the ‘cradle to the grave’ free health care provided to everyone – whether rich, poor, sick, dying, hypochondriac or just a small-breasted teen who fancied a bit of a cleavage.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah Brown, joined the campaign with an emotive Tweet (an oxymoron?) and, since then, the British media has been covering this story pretty extensively (something that does not seem to have been echoed in the US, unfortunately – though the only reference to this I would ever expect to see on Fox News would be along the lines of “do you want British socialist scum recommending US policy?”).

Possibly the most interesting development in the whole tale was the Conservative leader, David Cameron, interrupting his holiday to publicly distance his party (the British equivalent to the Republicans) from aforementioned NHS-basher, Daniel Hannan. Rule #1 of British politics: fuck with the NHS at your peril.

Note to Americans: I’ve read some comments suggesting health care reform would decrease accountability. In this country, dissatisfaction is voiced in the most powerful way, by decisive elections! Perhaps, this is why the Republicans are so scared of reform? They’re worried it will prove so popular and benefit so many people, they’ll either never win an election again or have to completely change their ideology. Best to keep the public stupid and scared, eh?

Looking at the facts (a rare practice in this debate) provided by the BBC, US health isn’t the ‘best in the world’. Of course, the NHS isn’t either, and this explosion of support shouldn’t make us ignore some of the very real problems people have had with the system (for the record, not me; I’ve had three pretty significant operations with the NHS and have no complaints – if you’re looking for anecdotal comparisons, I recommend reading this moving account by someone who’s experienced both).

My own, considerably less moving, account of my own surgery last year:

As a patient, I was an absolute cunt

Spent the first three days angrily asking where's my belly button!? Still got it though

No, not some lovely NHS nurses. Gorgeous Crunkettes lending some moral support (with custom tees!)

I guess the point is that having shitty health care that may bankrupt you so private companies can get grotesquely wealthy just sounds offensive to my British delicacies. It makes me feel ill thinking about it. I suppose the saddest thing is that some American’s seem to be so obsessed with the ‘dream’ of corporate greed that they don’t see how innately unfair their system is.

Die young or live in Didcot? I’ll meet you at the train station…

Growing up in Didcot is very much like having a prostate exam. As much as you never wanted to be in such a position and as much as you try to get on with your life as if nothing happened, you can’t escape the knowledge that, metaphorically speaking, you HAVE had another man’s finger up your ass.

The sheer existence of Didcot relies on the necessity to link A and C with a B. While the eponymous parkway may have put Didcot on the map, it was the later introduction of the coal-burning power station that made it a visible blight on the landscape. While both the railway station and impressive cooling towers can be appreciated from either the comfort of a train carriage or a reasonably tall hill several miles away, you need to get closer to discover what really makes Didcot so…well, I guess you have to go there to understand (or maybe just read the relentlessly dull Twitter feed)

I was able to escape a little under a year ago and, to be honest, expected to miss the ol’ place a lot more than I do. I still return every now and again to visit my parents or scope some feral jailbait and I’m genuinely surprised by how much shittier the place is than I remember. Recently, I was struck with an inescapable comparison to the moment in Back to the Future Part II when Marty travels back from 2015 to find Hill Valley totally fucked – except worse as I didn’t even have a hover board.

Before tonight, there would have been little I could credit Didcot with except possibly for allowing me to claim a deprived upbringing whenever I think it’ll help. However, after watching an old episode of Mock the Week on Dave earlier, there is one positive thing to say:

Didcot offers undeniable proof that God exists. And he’s a bastard with a sick sense of humour.

You see, a few years back Didcot appeared in the top twenty list of the crappest towns in the UK. If enough people who lived there actually explored the town beyond the route from their home to the train station, this might have been cause for a fuss. As for the young boys and girls who fight with their Abingdon opposites out of pride for their community, their literacy rate falls somewhere just above being able to read the pregnancy test results and below the instructions for a condom, so they wouldn’t have found out about it anyway.

This isn’t shocking anyway. What is mind-blowingly surprising however (and provides final proof in that God character), is that residents of Didcot have the longest, healthiest lives in the whole of England and Wales! This article from The Telegraph uses the phrase “… residents enjoy the longest, healthiest lives…” but I think ‘enjoy’ is surely pushing the limits of journalistic integrity.

What kind of twisted world do we live in where one of the most depressing and soulless places in the UK also has its most healthily long-lived population? Living in Didcot’s kind of like being in a stable coma on life support – do yourself a favour and pull the fucking plug already.

Update! Here’s a video clip of that Mock the Week referencing Didcot (and legs on pies…)