The case of a (now ex-)parrot in Miami got me thinking about the caring professions and their relationship with lucre.
I do wonder about some people. Not least Anne Lowery from Florida, who spent £50,000 on chemotherapy for her 42-year-old Wagler’s Conure parakeet called Areba - who then became an ex-parrot within a year. Dr Teresa Lightfoot, the vet who administered the avian injections (and swiped Ms Lowery’s card) said, 'It was tough for Areba. But we improved her quality of life and gave her and her mom more time together.' (I don’t know what they teach them at Miami vet school, but I doubt if the prospect of homo sapiens giving birth to a Wagler’s Conure parakeet is included in the curriculum.)
These kind of stories are ten-a-penny in our mad world. Kids starve in Africa and some nut job spends fifty grand on her parrot. But it was all brought home to me last week by my brother and his dog Sidney. Sidney is a crazed lurcher/greyhound cross with an IQ of around 12, breath like an open sewer and a bad attitude towards small furry animals such as foxes and squirrels. Last week he made the serious error of taking off across the road in pursuit of his prey and was hit by a Transit (tt didn’t bother stopping). My brother took the broken-legged mutt to the vet and they donned the mask to have a look.
After an X-ray came the bad news – the specialist orthopaedic operation required would cost £4,500. I can’t say this surprised me – when you spend eight years getting trained to acquire your veterinary certificate, you really want to fill your boots when you're finally are let loose on Satan the Rottweiler and Squeaker the hamster. I recall the bloke who used to see to our childhood cat Marmaduke when felled by fleas or feline enteritis drove a Jaguar XJS. The emotional blackmail used by vets will be familiar to any pet owner.
This got me thinking about the caring professions and their relationship with lucre. Not least because after failing to visit my wife and children on the last two occasions they were really pretty unwell - a nasty allergic reaction in the case of the 8 month old baby - we’ve just had a seriously snotty letter from the GP, saying if we don’t get the toddler in for his second dose of MMR, we're going to get slung off their list. The fact that they lose money if they don’t reach their children’s immunisation targets is the reason for this. I feel like ringing up to suggest that if they agree to visit, we’ll do the immunisation - but that would be childish. And they probably wouldn’t answer the phone anyway.
What they need to remember is that following their contract renegotiations and the huge uplift in their salaries, the out-of-hours service offered – or rather not offered - by most GPs is now a shambles. Only one in 50 services is meeting the out-of-hours performance targets set to ensure patients get proper advice and treatment.
GPs, like vets, are not saints - they are small businesses operating in a very odd market. Many are hugely successful. Take Dr Suppiah Ratneswaren, 61, who is linked to four separate NHS practices in the south London borough of Greenwich. He’s admitted he is earning between £300,000 and £400,000 a year, 90% of it from the health service. And yet I notice today their Royal College is yet again trying to make access to them more difficult, because they don’t want to be bothered with 'minor ailments'. It seems to me that GPs have spent the last decade telling us all that they wish to do less work for more money. You can't blame them for trying; but that doesn't mean we have to buy it.
The point is a simple one. As members of the NHS resist the inevitable public spending cuts that will come after an election, they will scream blue murder about protecting patient care and why health should be ring-fenced. It should not. Many of them will genuinely be concerned about this. But, human nature being what it is, they're anxious to keep their own nests feathered too.
