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Patient presentation 4

Please note, this page is a summary of the full conference speech (click here for the full transcript).

Austin Donohoe

"How many of you here today have challenged what the consultant has said?" he asked.

"Or what's been written about the Renal Association? Or have we ever written to a clinical director?"

When you got right down to it, it was all about money. Maybe not simply money now, but things that could have been fixed if money had been spent in the past in a good way. Most health staff were under enormous pressures, they had jobs, they had careers.

"All I would say is, we need to recognise that a bit more than we do", said Austin.

Having dealt with three governments, maybe four, seven or eight ministers and three or four shed loads of officials, one of the things he had learnt above all was that it was amazing what could be done when patients worked together, particularly when they were saying the same thing on a single issue.

As a patient receiving good treatment in Newcastle, he had assumed that everybody did, and was astounded to find out that this was not the case.

The whole renal thing reminded him of a cake. It was badly mixed and was lumpy. You had to live in a specific place if you wanted to get all the ingredients, and some thought the cake was too big and were biting away at the edges. There were loads of cooks, but nobody seemed to know the recipe, least of all the head chef.

"So it seems to me the whole thing is a bit half-baked", said Austin.

He took as one example the fact that acceptance rates in Greater Manchester varied between 34 to 98 per million populations. But then someone would point out that it could be due to an older population in some areas and more Afro Caribbean in others, and suddenly what you thought was an incontrovertible fact became more controvertible.

He had come across an NKF declaration in 1985, when the much-missed David Poulter and Frank Howarth were chairmen:

'The aim for patients is to have access to a comprehensive level of care which takes into account patients medical and social needs.'

"We could have the same aims today", said Austin.

Please note, this page is a summary of the full conference speech (click here for the full transcript).

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