- The Observer,
- Sunday May 11 2003
'We knew from the beginning that this was the week that really mattered, and that all the stops had to be pulled out.
'I was on casualty, looking at the medical cases. Suddenly we had lots of extra senior house officers provided by a locum agency. They cost a great deal, but that didn't seem to matter.
'Lots of managers were around and senior nurses were drafted in to help. I felt sorry for some of the younger nurses because they were under a lot of pressure to get patients through quickly. If there were any patients who had been waiting longer than four hours, the staff had to give an explanation of what had happened.
'Sometimes it got a bit silly. A patient might be waiting in A&E for the results of some tests, but as soon as they approached the four-hour limit, they would have to be whisked off for admission to a ward.
'So they would be going on to the ward without the X-ray or the ECG or the blood test result that they needed. It would have been better to wait slightly longer to get the result and decide the course of treatment, rather than meeting such tight time constraints.
'The week afterwards, everything went back to normal. I found that quite demoralising, because we felt really under-resourced compared with the previous week. For that short space of time, we had worked in a good environment where we had loads of doctors and patients were much happier as a result.'
