Lost souls of A&E

RACING to the rescue in the Brighton lifeboat or writing columns for the Argus must seem a doddle to Bini McCall compared with the battle she wages day by day helping the sick and needy in her job as a nursing sister.

Cool and calm, she immediately took charge when my wife Ellen was rushed to the A&E department of the Royal Sussex County Hospital last week with severe chest pains.

Bini, 40, is one of a handful of emergency co-ordinators who run A&E and struggle to cope with some 1,200 patients a week.

As an RNLI part-time volunteer she attends a Buckingham Palace reception for lifeboat crews on Thursday.

It will be like fairyland compared with A&E. This is the sharp end of the NHS. The medical services cannot be faulted and the doctors and nurses are magnificent, but they are all suffering with what nowadays is called system failure.

Chaos and confusion are everywhere. All the cubicles are taken and trolleys line the walls. Forlorn and lost, some poor souls - many in their eighties - have been lying there for 12 hours. And they say this is a quiet day.

Most of the time patients haven't a clue what's happening. Sheer bedlam.

The army of porters seem to control the flow. They are everywhere and yet it's still a laborious business finding someone to push a trolley or wheelchair. Each stage of the assessment process can take hours. The whole system cries out for a time and motion study.

Co-ordinators spend much of their time in negotiation, trying to persuade wards to take patients out of A&E. There are frequently no takers - it depends on the ward's resources in staff and beds. I've got an old lady of 81," pleads one sister, "broken hip, quite straightforward. You MUST have something."

It's nearly eight hours before Ellen is moved to Donald Hall ward. The first thing that greets her is a male patient's bare bum as he pees into a bottle. She nearly freaks out. A mixed ward - another triumph of political correctness.

The ward regime proves to be as haphazard as A&E. Staff shortages are usually blamed for problems in the NHS, but

the extraordinary cock-ups we witnessed had little to do with how many doctors or nurses were on duty.

We actually met an old boy from Portslade who reckoned he'd been lost in the system for a week. He was transferred to a ward and left there. Eventually he told a nurse about it and a doctor turned up.

Doctors eventually diagnose Ellen's trouble - an abdominal infection. She's prescribed tablets and painkillers and sent home. It has taken three days. All's well that ends well so a big thank you to the Royal Sussex - and do change the system!

Spirited defence of England

I THINK England football managers must be chosen for their ability to look on the bright side as much as win matches. They call it the Dunkirk spirit.

Graham Taylor and Glenn Hoddle always appeared full of the joys of spring, whatever disaster befell our national game, implying that our losses really were all for the good.

Now Kevin Keegan is at it. We got into the play-offs for Euro 2000 next summer by the skin of our teeth, thanks to Sweden beating Poland, and he immediately trumpeted that England "are good enough to win it".

Oh yeah. We only have to beat the likes of Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Sweden and the Czech Republic. Never mind, Kevin, we did defeat Belgium on Sunday. By a whisker.

Mind you, take anything you read about football with a large pinch of salt. We are told Sir Alex Ferguson and Posh Spice are in competition to see which one really is David Beckham's boss.

What rubbish. Like myself, David was born within spitting distance of the Hackney Marshes and in that part of the world we are taught from birth who's boss - Mum, followed by Dad.

The not-so-gentle sex

LADIES, please remember you're supposed to be the gentle sex. I'm all for you getting a fair deal, but just how far do you propose to take the battle of the sexes?

The great Henry Cooper was telling me the other day of his disgust at the spectacle of female boxers in the ring.

Muhammad Ali's daughter Laila Ali, a 21-year-old Los Angeles manicurist, became a boxer and knocked out her first opponent in 31 seconds, earning £16,000.

You could say Henry and I are old codgers rooted in the past, but that doesn't mean we're against all the advances made by the opposite sex.

What courage we witnessed from women members of the emergency services after the Paddington rail disaster.

Ministering angels, yes. Pugilists? No thanks.

Info-highway to hell

Someone has to clean up the Internet - fast becoming a cesspit of deceit and depravity.

The Government is worried about its effect on children.

Already the vice barons are cashing in. Punters tap in credit card details and the gates open to a flood of dirty pictures and stories, even video shows.

Some of the world's highest-paid call girls have websites. Search engines that navigate for net users offer adult services. Soon they'll be advertising prostitutes.

The latest scam is cybersquatters, who set up websites in the name of celebrities and plaster them with pornographic and other unsuitable material. The idea is to sell the site to the victims for several thousand pounds.

Victims include Radio 1 disc jockeys Zoe Ball and Chris Moyles, Rod Stewart, the Spice Girls and Kate Winslet.

The problem is that the web is an international free-for-all and no single country or organisation has control.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.