bad press and beating the odds.

The news is filled with bad press against hospitals and the NHS at the moment. All everyone hears about is how hospitals are not doing their job properly! I recently read an article claiming that you are considerably more likely to die if admitted to hospital on a weekend, which seems completely absurd! I just want to take a minute to highlight all of the brilliant work that is performed everyday that, at the moment, appears to be overlooked. A few years ago my younger brother was involved in a serious car accident, in which he was hit by a car. He suffered from very serious injuries including multiple broken bones and swelling and bleeding in his brain. He was admitted to, what I consider to be one of the best hospitals in the country; Sheffield Children's Hospital. The doctors, surgeons, nurses, occupational therapists and physiotherapists all did a tremendous job! He was rushed into surgery where a third of his skull was removed to reduce the swelling and was later replaced with a metal plate. This kind of surgery is difficult and risky to perform on children and it went on with minimal complications. They also inserted a microchip and shunt as he was suffering from a condition call hydrocephalus, in which water builds around the brain. Three years on Dan is now a perfectly healthy teenager, getting up to all the mischief normal teenagers would. From appearances and talking to him no one would know what he has been though which shows how successful his treatment was. What I am really trying to say is cases like Dan's truly show how phenomenal the work of NHS professionals is and people need to always remember this. The odds were really against Dan and the surgeons did an incredible job treating Dan. You can this see from the picture below; you wouldn't think that was a child that had been in a very serious, life threatening accident a month earlier! The photo below that shows Dan and I more recently; he is really a normal teenager that, with the help of NHS professionals, beat all the odds.