Showing posts with label health centre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health centre. Show all posts

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Not an uppercut, just a jab

I went to get a flu jab today. Not the trickiest of procedures. The first time I did it here I was in a hospital for something else and there was a bloke giving away free vaccine in the hospital entrance so I stopped and got one. Last year, in the dark days of one of the several waves of Covid, the health centre was in silence and I was severely disinfected and made to follow arrows on the floor which pointed to the young woman with the sharp needle. I've got the jab another couple of times as well and the process has been swift and painless (in both senses).

I'd booked up my jab using the health service's mobile phone app. Ten past ten. I rolled up at nine minutes past and asked someone on reception where to go. She waved to the seats where lots of people were waiting. I waited and I waited. I had a bit of a chat with Enrique and a much longer one with Dorothy. It began to get stupid. I went over and collared someone wearing white pyjamas. "No idea," she said, "I'll ask". Thirty seconds later she came back and said "Go around the back".  Presumably using a separate entrance is a vestige of trying to keep people from mixing too much. So I did. There was nothing obvious but there were people milling around looking medical. I asked again. Dorothy had now joined me and, unlike me, she had walked through the building, unchecked. I felt like a fathead for following a procedure that nobody knew or cared about. Eventually we both got our vaccinations.

Now I'm a big defender of things Spanish. When Britons say, disdainfully, "Well, it's Spain, what do you expect?", with the clear implication that the UK is vastly superior, I often find myself pointing out that all bureaucratic procedures have their strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise it wouldn't have taken the UK tax people 18 months to give back the money they had wrongly charged me and it wouldn't have taken eight months for my UK bank to acknowledge that the language spoken in Spain is Spanish, making official documentation in English relatively hard to come by. On the other hand there are times in Spain when hair tearing and temper tantrums seem absolutely appropriate. I don't generally go into banks or post offices much but when I do, when there is no other option, I know that the counter service will be frustrating beyond belief. I have tried to see the funny side of the clerks going for breakfast as I get to the front of the queue or the look of complete horror as bank staff stare at the information on the computer screen as though it was something completely new to them, and written in Malay, but I can't.

Obviously some things take time. I cannot suggest a way that a butcher's shop or a deli counter could speed up the process and still offer the same service. On the other hand sometimes it's so blatantly obvious where the failing is that the solution is just as obvious. Information signs, information signs with correct and up to date information, would be a good start in nearly every case. Mind you I suppose lots of us might, like the HSBC bank, want all that information in English.

Friday, May 07, 2021

Getting my jab

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it.

Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything.

I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first sheet told me all the possible side effects. One of those was cefalea. I sniggered. It's the technical term for a range of headaches. Spanish "authorities" have never agreed with Hemingway that there are older and simpler and better words and always choose to use an obscure word to show how much cleverer they are than you. There was a date and time for the second dose too just three weeks away. The second sheet told me that I was getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The paperwork also told me the internet links to get copies of the full prospectus sheet for the vaccine and a certificate of vaccination.

I waited a while. A young woman wearing a white coat and pushing a trolley asked me if I was allergic to anything - I gave my usual answer of bills and taxes - she checked if I was taking some drug, which I wasn't, and pushed a needle in to the top of my arm. The same sort of injection that I've had hundreds if not thousands of times before. She pushed a bit of damp gauze against my "wound" and said to wait for fifteen minutes. I did. Then I left. At the door I made a vague effort to check f it were OK to leave but nobody was the least interested in me and I needed to go to Alfredo's to arrange a haircut while I was in town.

And still no band.

Wednesday, April 03, 2019

On protecting my anonymity

I went to see the doctor this morning. Like all the doctors I've ever encountered, doctors in Spain make you wait. This is obviously because a doctor's time is much more valuable than mine or, indeed, yours. In truth, nowadays, nearly everyone's time is more valuable than mine in a financial sense but, as usual, I seem to be straying up a branch line.

I've been to the doctor a few times over the years in Pinoso but not to the point that it's second nature to me. I was quite decided to be decisive today. The last time I was there there was a little printed list stuck up with sellotape outside the doctors door. The appointments were arranged in 15 minute blocks. Inside the fifteen minute block there would be three names; three people had the same appointment time. I couldn't remember whether the system was first come first served or whether the list order gave the order. My decisiveness amounted to no more than asking rather than muddling through.

I was stymied on two counts. First of all there were three Britons, a couple and a single, outside my assigned door and they were people that I knew. Conversation was to be struck. The pair were in with "my" doctor before me so, until they moved, there was no hurry. They weren't sure where they were in the running order so I asked the people waiting on the plastic chairs. It was an easy conversation. I had the same time as a young woman but the system is first come first served. "It has to be that way now," said someone. "There used to be a list but the data protection act has stopped that". "Ah", said someone else. "That's why the nurse now calls people by numbers rather than names I suppose". "No matter", I said, "Spaniards like to talk". I was relieved that they sniggered rather than stringing me up by my thumbs.

I suppose that the data protection thing is to do with consent to use personal data now being clear and certain. Just because I want to see a doctor doesn't mean that I gave anyone permission to release the fact that I am there. Maybe I want to remain anonymous. Actually as I booked my appointment using an application on my phone I suppose that the list would have contravened that rule about data on a person not being used for another purpose. Maybe I should read the data protection stuff more carefully. When we visited Jumilla Castle a few weeks ago I was asked to send an email with certain details. Nothing too Edward Snowden but name, address, email and my ID number. The woman on the phone said it was for data protection. Odd though, now my data is protected they know all sorts about me whereas before they would just have known that Chris and Maggie were on their list for castle visiting.

Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Round midnight

It was just after ten and I was putting away my paperwork at the end of the class when a WhatsApp message pinged on my phone. It said that Maggie was helping a couple of friends out with a bit of a medical emergency. One of them was having trouble breathing and, at the local health centre, they needed someone who understood Spanish. Maggie stepped into the breach.

Later it was decided to transfer the ill person to the nearby hospital in Elda for tests and what not. We ended up going too and so, around midnight, we found ourselves hanging around in the Urgencias, the Accident and Emergency of the local hospital. Nobody was watching the telly high on the wall, someone was throwing up on the pavement outside, the drinks and snack machines were doing a slow but constant trade. The main activity though was waiting; staring at mobile phones or talking in small groups. Nobody looked rich, nobody looked well dressed, one woman was even in her dressing gown and nightie - when things happen quickly I don't suppose there is time to spruce yourself up. Quite a few of the men were in shorts despite it only being 11ºC.

It reminded me of so many places with old plastic chairs or faded and lopsided posters on the walls, dole offices for instance, but, more than anything, it brought to mind my occasional overnight coach trips from Petrer to Madrid and on to Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo. A motorway service station and an A&E waiting room when the world has slowed down for the day are surprisingly similar places.

No particular news on our pal as I write- stable but not fixed.