Colin Doherty: A modest proposal to avoid winter health logjams
More and more patients are surviving heart attacks and strokes to live for decades with chronic illnesses – and a model of care that waits for an emergency before acting simply can’t cope.
Fifty years ago this week, in December 1967, 22-year-old Denise Darvall arrived in critical condition at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, having been run over by a truck.
There were no trolleys in the emergency department in those days, but it mattered little to poor Denise and her family. Her injuries were so severe that within hours she was declared brain dead.
Her father Edward was then presented with an ...
