OVERCROWDING at Great Western Hospital became so bad a few days back that officials put a big treatment tent up outside as a precaution.

As far as I can see, there are now only two ways of moving forward.

One is for local NHS chiefs to continue using tents. Indeed, a large group of tents could be put up in order to solve the crisis at minimal expense.

If this is option the bosses go for, there are a few other ways in which they might save money and enhance the patient experience.

For example, instead of using ambulances to get patients to the hospital, it would be far more efficient to strap them to the skids of small helicopters.

Obviously, any patient upset by this, perhaps because they don’t like heights, would need something distracting to take their mind off it once they arrived. I suggest having them greeted by a hairy, friendly, big-nosed man from Toledo, Ohio, wearing a party frock.

Camaraderie among doctors might be promoted by obliging them to live in tents while on duty, and turning a blind eye if they got up to mischief such as distilling gin.

Children overwhelmed by the hospital experience might be lent a Teddy Bear – perhaps by the young bloke who mans the phones and does the Tannoy announcements.

That bloke could also handle any complaints, filing them under “Treatment,” “Cleanliness,” “Waiting Time,” and: “This series is grossly overrated and nowhere near as good as the film with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould.”

If hospital bosses decide against opening a MASH unit in the car park, however, they’re going to need another plan.

One thing they shouldn’t do is waste any more time or money telling us not to visit Accident and Emergency for trivial reasons. We know we shouldn’t go to A&E for trivial reasons, because only narcissists, self-righteous drunkards and the irremediably dim-witted go to A&E for trivial reasons.

We know that for a fact because we met them all the last time we were at A&E for a non-trivial reason.

Of course, there are times when we ordinary folk do turn up at A&E with conditions suitable for treatment by a GP or a pharmacist. Unfortunately, the chances are that we’ve been told that our hard-pressed GP has a waiting list of a week or a fortnight, the pharmacy is shut and we’ve tried phoning that NHS helpline and found ourselves fielding a raft of irrelevant questions focused more on preventing possible legal action than anything else.

If you’re an NHS boss and you happen to be reading this, do you seriously think anybody in their right mind would be willing to spend hours on end in an A&E waiting room, perhaps listening to the howls of people under the influence of God knows what, unless we were genuinely poorly?

Do you seriously think we would selfishly add to the horrific burden of overworked front line staff?

Actually, I daresay you do think that – or prefer to. That’s probably how you got to be an NHS boss in the first place.

Rather than blaming the public, from whose pockets your handsome salaries are chiselled, perhaps you could actually try to free up some cash to spend on extra staff and infrastructure. A good start might be to make a list of non-medical staff on, say, 50 grand a year or more – including yourselves – and ask whether they’re really necessary.

You might also want to deliver an ultimatum to Whitehall, stating clearly that you don’t have the funds to cope and want more.

This will probably knacker your prospects of advancement and honours, but I’m sure you care more about patient welfare than knighthoods, damehoods and similar nonsense.

Don’t you?

  • THERE have been complaints about a dog waste bin in North Swindon not being emptied often enough.

    The bin in question was left overflowing, with bags of faeces scattered around its base, and the problem was apparently due to a staff member being absent due to illness.Understandably, plenty of locals were unhappy about the situation.

    Call me controversial, but I suspect some of the blame for the unpleasantness might lie with the people who flung bags of muck at the base of the bin in the first place. “Hmm, there’s no space in the bin,” they seem to have thought, “so I’ll just dump this muck here anyway, where it can be disturbed by other dogs, fester a bit and generally make things unpleasant in an open space that belongs to me and everybody else.”

    Having walked a few dogs and cleaned up after them, even I know that the best thing to do is keep hold of the bag and wait until you get to either another bin or your own at home.

    The advantages of this are (a) it doesn’t involve befouling your community’s common space and (b) you’ll never have to send off for one of those hand-warmers from the catalogues you get in the Sunday papers.

  • THE council is about to decide whether to take a developer to court over a 20-year-old promise to build a crossing on the Swindon and Cricklade Railway.

    It seems the dispute is over the type of crossing, with the local authority wanting a full manually-operated crossing while the developers want to put up a couple of gates.

    I hope the issue can be resolved amicably, and soon, but I can’t help wondering why both parties don’t simply look at the contract they signed all those years ago.

    Surely the exact type of crossing is specified there, as nobody would be so negligent as to leave out such a crucial detail.

    After all, lives are potentially at stake.

  • THE underpass between Station Road and The Oasis, known for years as Mugger’s Alley, has been the scene of yet another violent criminal offence.

    This time, a young woman suffered a serious sexual assault.

    Perhaps the time has come to place large warning signs at either end of the underpass, showing a list of the categories of crime that have taken place there over the last five years or so.

    Beneath this data I suggest the following message: “Danger! Turn back and find another route. Criminals have staked their claim to this underpass and it now effectively belongs to them, not you.”