A good coffee

Back to North Shore Hospital after the weekend to continue the EPI locum. Decided to buy lunch and a coffee at the new cafe seen here. The coffee was good; might ask for a double shot next time, though. The bread roll was very nice. A decent lunch all round. And another for my cafe series.

The ESCafe is in the building known as the Elective Surgery Centre (ESC). This is an initiative of the "innovative", "dynamic", and many other (not all positive) adjectives, Chairman of the District Health Board. While it has taken a quarter of a century to find money to provide a purpose built and modern unit for the acutely mentally ill (and it is yet to be finished), this building went from a plan to being functional within three years of his being appointed Chair of the Board (by the "tory" government).

The innovative aspect of this is that the building was built and equipped using public money (even if some is borrowed), is on a public hospital site, is staffed by nurses and other non medical disciplines employed by the DHB, and pays public money to surgeons operating as "private practitioners" paying them the same as they would be paid to do the work in private.

It has resulted in huge decreases in the waiting times for elective surgery, which my old class mate (an orthopaedic surgeon) informs me has resulted in patients getting surgery they don't really need. Ah; but he's just an old fogey, like me.The politicians, of course, love the outcome as they can only deal with numbers not with clinical needs.

The elderly, the very young, the mentally ill; what services are provided for them? Certainly no more than when the current Government first came to power. Arguably there is less being done for these groups, who have the least power in our society.

Thank you to everyone who looked at commented and gave me stars and hearts for yesterday's Kawau sunrise. It not only made the spotlight pages. It was still there as I started to post today's blip.