• I’M sure many readers have had similar experiences relating to our poor groaning NHS, but I thought it might be of interest to report on my own rather traumatic episode at St Ann’s Hospital in Tottenham.

Booked for a scan, I took a taxi to the hospital (husband’s orders) but had no specific directions to give the driver, who eventually parked, mystified, at some sort of cul-de-sac and hurried away to more easily identifiable destinations.

I then wandered over vast tracts of barren hospital land without, quite literally, seeing a single soul. This uncertain journey seemed to go on for ever until I somehow stumbled on a kind of Nissen hut which seemed to feature human beings glimpsed through its grimy windows.

From this base I then went into another, smaller Nissen hut in which utterly charming human beings attended to me and put up with my at first mildly hysterical state. I’m sure they would have been as charming whoever had employed them, but a grubby notice on the polystyrene wall spoke of the glories of InHealth, to which outfit my scanning had been “outsourced”.

I should point out that I suffer from depression and emotional insecurity, but as I finally wandered homeward through acres resembling the atrophied site of a war zone, I began to draw metaphorical conclusions between the state of St Ann’s and the overall condition of the NHS.

Passing an inquisitive fox nosing its way along the margins of the path, I began to appreciate the aesthetic beauties of the ravaged landscape and wished I had brought my camera.

However, no photographic record, however aesthetic, could really make up for the ravages of what politicians insist on referring to as “our NHS”. The more they destroy it, the more sentimentally do they extol its virtues.

The effective death-in-life of once-well-staffed institutions like St Ann’s is only too eloquent evidence of the fact that the NHS is no longer, if it ever was, “ours”.

SHEILA COHEN
Barnsbury Park, N1