Hospital case
CITY life is full of hazards as it is. At any moment I may be flattened by a scooter messenger, or bite on a bad piece of smoked salmon, or have my arm twisted or my ear bent or bitten. Now I can lie back on my stretcher and be carried off to hospi- tal, secure in the knowledge that the City will have one and that I shall have a friend at court there. The Royal Hospitals Trust — the odd-couple merger of Bails in the City and the Royal London in Whitechapel — is to have a new chairman in the new year: Brian Gilmore. He spent an unusual career in Whitehall, deciding what would work, as he says, and then making the rule- book fit round it. (One of his achievements was to make it fit the Channel Tunnel.) Now he must find a way to make the NHS's rule-book fit the City, which has a popula- tion of something like 300,000 by day, when the scooter messengers ride riot, but only a handful by night, when most of us are safe in bed somewhere else. Unfortunately the NHS does its headcount at midnight, which is why it came up with the fatuous idea of closing Barts. That idea has now been scrapped, but as Brian Gilmore explains, 'We're funded by capitation, which is based on residence rather that work.' So if the workaday City wants Bails, we shall have to support it? 'If they really want it, it will be nice to see the colour of their money.' Now he's talking.
Previous page
