Call the Midwife

I watched East is East last night.
It’s 20 years old now and Linda Bassett looked so young in it.
She’s probably my favourite character on CTW, but I think they’re in need of a couple of fresh midwives, lest it gets a bit stale and cedes all the character storylines to a barrage of 60s woke themes.

I'm afraid I have given up on Call the Midwife after watching (and enjoying) every previous series. I have just got bored with it.

Well that wasn't very good last night. Sister Julienne wandering about in an old mac, to prove a point she already knew. A whole load of fuss and bother about going to the pictures and the Turners getting romantic!!!

If that bloke was getting visits every day for his injections, any decent District Nurse would have realised his wife was worn out and looked fit to drop and had a word with the daughter way beforehand. DNs took a very holistic approach and they would probably have already known about the mother with dementia too. Sometimes you do want to shout at these nun nurses to get their act together.

I shouldn't like this programme,but it is one of the highlights of the week.

Cant explain why,probably because it is so well made,and believable.

Anyway,a real-tear jerker last night.

That new Doctor is up to something...Drugs of some kind ?

Yep you can get addicted to pethidine and it has a pretty decent street value. It's around about now that the drug explosion starts and the NHS realised that doctors were behind a bit of it. They are more likely to be involved in over medicating themselves and some are struck off every year for this, but occasionally they falsify patient records to get more drugs or provide NHS prescriptions for private patients - you can be struck off for these too. Often if it is self-medication they may just be sanctioned and suspended for a while, depending on what the situation is. I have personally known of one doctor who was allowed to continue practising after a 6 month suspension, but not allowed to write prescriptions etc. However, doctors are involved in the illegal drug trade and have been since laws were created making drugs illegal.

It is still relatively easy to falsify a prescription, all you need is a patient that might be eligible for codeine and you write them up a prescription at the same time they visited the surgery, even though they never got it or wanted it. If you do this on the paper pad it is easier than on the computer. Of course you have to remember to delete it afterwards or at least before the next appointment or next prescription is issued. Therefore in order to avoid this, doctors have sometimes created a person or re-established a patient who no longer comes to the practice. Handy if you live in a student area or an area with high numbers of transient people. Someone like a foreign student who was only here for a couple of years. They nearly always get caught eventually. It is much harder to catch them if the patient colludes and sometimes patients collude for quite altruistic reasons. There have been cases of a GP persuading a friend to have prescriptions for medication they didn't need so that the doctor could post it to a relative abroad or someone here not entitled to NHS treatment or who has been told by another doctor that they don't need that medication anymore etc. The biggest con with prescriptions is private doctors issuing NHS prescriptions, sometimes to patients not entitled to NHS treatments or to patients who can afford the private surgery and consultations but not the continuing medication e.g. fertility treatments is a big area where this fraud happens.

This is one of the reasons the NHS constantly reviews medication use and drugs like Tramadol become hospital only medications e.g. only to be prescribed by a hospital consultant and not the GP in the first instance and only with continued monitoring by a consultant. This doesn't rule out collusion or falsification but it does make it much harder.