My mum’s currently recovering from a second hip replacement surgery, in a local hospital. She just messaged to say that after a very rough first night, she’s had a better second night, ‘in spite of [the] noisy ward.’
I replied that I was glad of the former (the better nights sleep, of course!). I didn’t respond to the latter, as she’d most probably be ‘brought down’ by my ‘negativity’!
So I’ll share my thoughts on that second part of her message here.
I think there’s a pretty major problem in our modern hospitals, re noise vs calm. And I say this based entirely on personal experience. Not just of my own time in hospitals, but when visiting others (family).
My own last/most recent visit to a hospital A&E – excluding the numerous routine blood tests I’m obliged to undergo – was, frankly, appalling, from the point of view of ‘healing’.
The levels of noise – bleeping electronics in partic’ (never mind groaning or screaming fellow patients*) – meant it was more torture chamber than place of healing. The irony!
* On several occasions my father’s been admitted to hospital in recent years. And it’s often been the case that the proximity to other patients, expressing their suffering in distressingly unchecked manners, has likewise been more conducive to furthering ill health, as opposed to recovery.
Perhaps this especially true of mental health? As factories for the return to purely physical or mechanical health? Well, modern hospitals are more about that, it seems to me. Keep the drones sufficiently functional for society at large to tick over.
And to my mind that’s a very fundamental flaw in the system, proceeding from political and moral sources. I attribute it to Toryism, or under-investment in public health and wellbeing.
Hospitals should be like the best private sanatoriums. The sort you glimpse a little of in classic old black movies. In which wealthy patients have access to private rooms, and plenty of attentive staff!
But I fear that with the relentless pursuit of private profit for the few, over the common good, let alone any visions of well-being for the many, things are destined just to get worse.
As author Kurt Vonnegut (I think?) laments, with his usual world-weary and acerbic insight, modern humanity might well self-annihilate on the basis that to take a more long term or morally sound view simply isn’t ‘cost effective’.*
NB – The non-movie screenshots that ‘illustrate’ this post were culled from the top few google results returned by the search terms ‘noisy hospitals’. Unsurprisingly a large topic. But one which, like the godawful beeping devices’ is being steadfastly ignored by those in a position to address it. To the detriment of the majority.
* I’ve seen this quote being attributed to Kurt online:
‘We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective’