I spent a week audio typing at Nottingham City Hospital. NCH was clearly built piecemeal and is a bona fide maze, but all Nottinghamians will know this. St Francis Unit, the building where I was working, appears to have originally been two buildings which were then joined together, turning the path between them into the main corridor. The result is that the floor is slightly sloped, and all the offices leading off it are up steps.

The room where I was working struck me as a microcosm of all the flaws with the NHS at the moment. It was a hole, cramped and pokey with a single fairly narrow window, and, until I opened said window, much too hot as well. Cramped not only because of the furniture stuffing the tiny office (which led to another small office) but because of the paperwork and paperwork and paperwork piled high in trays on literally every flat surface. This was touch-it-and-it-topples territory, if-you-remove-this-from-the-cabinet-make-a-note-on-the-card territory. The introduction of computers has seemingly made this office, if possible, more paperful. I would have had a permanent pile of "work to be done" but there was hardly room to place one. Get these poor guys a Patients Wiki, pronto.

Easier said than implemented, of course.

Typing letters up from audio is the kind of thing I can stand for about five days total due to sheer boredom and repetition. When the letters are from consultant psychiatrists to general practitioners and all regard mentally ill elderly people, I not only get that but morbid, sickening fear of the imminent, looming future in which I will lose all my mental faculties and die alone and insane. Luckily, by scratching away in my tiny office I successfully avoided meeting any actual patients. Still, no, I would not like to stay another week, thanks for the offer.