Thoughts on the Wobble Room.

Anybody who’s been reading this blog for any length of time will know that the Royal Derby Hospital has become a reluctant second home to me over the past 2½ years. They will also know that the commonly used superlatives do scant justice to my feelings for the nursing staff there. I love them to bits, I really do.

Today the lovely RDH nurses were given a little feature on the national BBC News website. It talked about their setting up of a ‘wobble room’ – a room in the hospital reserved for the clinical staff where they can go and have a cry when things become just too much, before pulling themselves together and carrying on. And there’s a board in there on which they can write about ‘what I’m going to do when all this is over.’ One said ‘have the best party ever.’ Another wrote ‘hug my mum.’ Both so very human, so simple, so unprepossessing, and yet so touching.

I know they’ve been under intense pressure for the past eight months, and I know that eight months is a long time to hold yourself together under the weight of such pressure. That’s why, on reading about the wobble room, I wanted to go in there and ask them:

‘How do you do it? How do you continue to smile calmly when dealing with patients day after day, week after week, month after dispiriting month, some of whom must drive you to distraction occasionally? Why is nothing ever too much trouble for you? How do you continue to be everybody’s surrogate mother without complaint?’

And this is the National Health Service I’m talking about, so we patients don’t even have to pay for such care and dedication. We just turn up at the appointed time, lie back and wait to be cared for by caring people. The nurses, for their part, are public servants who get paid a modest salary for doing a job like everybody else. The NHS might not offer the opulence and frills of a privatised service, but the people who work there get the job done because they’re up to it. Do we deserve it? I hope some of us do.