So, the NHS has found a crafty way around its problem.
It has downgraded strokes and heart attacks, and in future, they will be treated in the same category as headaches.
More shock and horror.
And NHS England is now asking telephonists and ambulance crews to ignore these patients and to tell them that they will receive a phone call instead of an ambulance. (I wonder how long it will be before the waiting time for the phone call is measured in days rather than hours.)
Many will remember TV ads a couple of years ago in which the NHS told patients and relatives that it was important to get stroke victims to hospital as quickly as possible. You can forget that now.
The new advice is that patients who think they’ve had a heart attack or a stroke will be told to get in touch with their GP or a pharmacist.
Read that line again. And then, because you don’t believe me, check it out.
If you have a heart attack or a stroke you’re supposed to ring your GP and make an appointment for three weeks on Friday. Or drag yourself to the chemist and queue up for advice from a 16-year-old girl with O-level gymnastics and too much makeup.
Your GP will not, of course, visit you at home. The official advice is that GPs (who are now working a 26-hour week) are far too important to visit people at home. They have forms to fill in and sick notes and passport applications to sign. Besides, the medical establishment has decreed that global warming will be stopped much more readily if patients drive to the doctor’s surgery instead of the doctor driving to the patient’s home. (This is presumably because the patient who has had a heart attack or a stroke may have to travel on the bus whereas the GP would have to visit in the chauffeur driven 15 miles to the gallon Mercedes Benz S class which she bought with the loot she “earned” by instructing an NHS subsidised nurse to give a gazillion covid-19 jabs.)
And as far as I know, the 16-year-old girl at the chemist does not yet do home visits, unless she moonlights as a hairdresser or nail varnisher which is perfectly possible, of course.
Read more: How I hope to survive the NHS’s latest attempt to kill me