Something said by someone wiser than me* on Twitter today was 'Funny how the term 'socialized medicine' moves the base line. US is the exception, we have healthcare, they have have privatized healthcare'

Then I see this terrible story.

City hospital officials said they were shocked by surveillance footage showing a woman falling from her chair, writhing on the floor and dying as workers failed to help for more than an hour.

...The suit was especially critical of the hospital's emergency ward, saying it is so poorly staffed that patients are often marooned there for days while they wait to be evaluated.

While I may well moan about the state of the NHS, I still think that it was a brilliant idea and that it still does a fine job under difficult circumstances.

I think that this story should be printed on the wall of every A&E department in the country in order to point it out to patients who complain about waiting four hours for their sore knee problems.

*I've been in the same room as him twice, yet never had the chance to go and talk to him. Third time is the charm.

The problem with doing training courses in the ambulance service when you've come from being an A&E nurse is that it's really just a case of being told how to do stuff that I've already been doing. The entertainment (such as it is) comes from reading behind the lines of the course to see where our management are trying to steer us.

Yesterday's training day was about writing a good patient assessment - essential when you want people to start leaving patients at home.

All of this was done by the usual ambulance training method of 'death by powerpoint' - the teacher/facilitator/whatever the term is these days using the powerpoint presentation to jog their memory on what they are supposed to be talking about.

Luckily we had two excellent teachers yesterday, which made the day a lot more bearable. The good thing about LAS in service training is that most of the educators do treat us as adults.

The other problem is that to complete the course we need to write a reflective case study on a patient including how what we learnt on this training day has improved our practice.

One - How do I write about my improving practice when I already do all the things that were taught to us on this day.

Two - How boring must it be to write about an ambulance job?