“The pathway is enormously complicated and difficult”
“And also recently when I broke my back, I had a pretty poor…. had to go to A&E because I was just in agony and was there for a very long time, which was fine. But they didn’t X ray me; they just sort of said, ‘Oh, it’s likely to be muscular.’ And then was walking around for about eight weeks with some broken vertebrae. And, in the end, couldn’t get referred for physio etc. so I went privately and I saw the consultant, the back surgeon, privately. And felt quite guilty about that, really. Because I’m a big, huge advocate of the NHS. But it was just going on and on, and I just felt that… I just couldn’t get anywhere. I had people that I could refer to and ask about why are we doing this, what should we be doing? So what I worry about is there’s many people out there who don’t have access to that level of support, and what happens to them? If they have a similar experience, and we quite often have patients who ring us and you hear the story about how they’ve been bounced from pillar to post. And every single one of those people that speaks to them is trying their best to do the job, but it’s in that sort of morass of the pathway’s enormously complicated and difficult for them.”