When Doctor doesn't know best

Why, asks Penny Batchelor, doesn’t the NHS embrace the social model of disability and empower us to help them by making our own informed decisions

It started with a rather unattractive and large bird poo on my car. I needed to fill up with petrol and instead of going to the pay-at-pump petrol station I would normally go to for ease of use, I went to a different one that had a car wash.

When I walked to the kiosk to pay I came a cropper, slipping on a manhole cover and fracturing my femur. As I was born with brittle bones, fractures come with the territory.

This also means that I have infinitely more experience in dealing with them than the average, well-meaning NHS employee.

I couldn’t fault my care from the ambulance and A&E staff and was very grateful for it. But why does “the system” insist on following the medical model of disability and not the social model?

To “the system” I was a conundrum. I fell in London, where I had been visiting a friend.

I live in the Midlands, but had to go back to stay with my parents in Yorkshire for a fortnight until I was mobile enough in a wheelchair to go back home.

There came the rub. I didn’t have a wheelchair. When the London hospital discharged me they wouldn’t lend me a wheelchair. If I refused to leave without one I’d have to be admitted, taking up a bed that could be used for someone else. Up in Yorkshire, my parents’ GP surgery told me I could register as an emergency patient but it would
still take at least a week to be assessed for some wheels. My own GP was very helpful but I needed to be back home to be assessed by own county’s team – and to be back home I needed a wheelchair to be able to do something as basic as get to the loo unaided. In the meantime, like a scene from a comedy film, my mum inventively used their study chair on castors to wheel me from room to room.

The catch-22 situation was only broken when, after lots of phone calls, my dad managed to hire me a wheelchair. Of course not all of us can go to the bank of mum and dad for a temporary solution whilst “the system” follows its rules.

Clearly, NHS resources have to be applied efficiently and fairly. However, more listening to disabled people, who through our experiences become the experts on what we need, would save not only time and resources but tear down some of the unnecessary barriers we face every day.