Rodney – Volunteer

People – The life behind the uniform. NHS is its people and everyone has their own life story and unique reason for joining.

First one out in this new (as from March 2019) section of the website is Rodney. He works as a volunteer once a week on a ward in a hospital in south London.

I’m Rodney and I grew up in a small rural town of Nebraska, America. It was a small farming community of five or six thousand people, but still the major town of the area. My dad worked in a wholesale car parts company and my mother used to be the one filling up cars at a petrol station before she joined my dad in the company. She was born in a sod house made of bricks dug out of the earth and it had a dirt floor. My dad’s parents were living in Missouri and around 1900 they travelled to the Sandhills, a prairie of Nebraska, in a covered wagon.

We were two children, me and my brother. On Sundays, I used to sit in church and watch the organist play. Maybe my interest in music developed from there. I had lessons in piano and oboe playing and was a member in the school band.

Later, I got a degree in music at a university in Colorado and was awarded a fellowship. That took me to the Royal school of church music, which at that time was located at Addington Palace in South London.

I studied there for a year. I loved London, but it was very different. This was 1966 and at that time in America everybody I knew had central heating and a telephone – not so over here! I met my wife and we married 1968, up in Yorkshire.

For the next ten years we lived in America, teaching and playing music, and we got two children. By the end of the seventies my wife wanted to come back to England, so that was it. We sold up and went. By then, I’d had enough of teaching and found myself working for piano shops, both as a salesman and a manager, until 2010 when I retired.

I ‘d had doubts whether music really was the right thing for me and had always wondered if I shouldn’t have gone into some sort of caring job instead. Now was the time! My plan was to volunteer at The Specialist hospital where I had been a patient for a number of years, but volunteering there meant working in administration, the canteen or in a shop. That didn’t sound too exciting, I thought. So I started looking into this hospital which was close to home. Here, you can do what’s called NHS-volunteering, which means that you can interact with the patients. Also, it’s a hospital I’ve been a patient in myself. Yeah, that’s how I came to decide to be a volunteer here.

The process of becoming a volunteer took about six months – you go through the same procedure as if it was a paid job. There’s an application, an interview, a reference taking and a police check – It doesn’t happen overnight!

I work in day surgery. The most important part of the job is probably to make tea and coffee for the patients, but I also clean the beds, make them up, go to the pharmacy to get things for the patients and sometimes go to the kitchen to get food – whatever I can do to be helpful! I think probably the most important thing a volunteer can do is to spend time with the patients, give them someone to talk to, things that the normal staff don’t have time to do.

I’d like to think my job makes a difference. The patients say that it does.

The NHS is very different to the American system. There, you have the stress of having to pay for all the medical care. You can have an insurance, almost everyone does, but it’s very expensive. It’s usually provided through your employer so there are employer contributions and personal contributions. Then there is the problem of pre-existing conditions: If you’ve got an illness, say a heart problem, then your cover won’t include that. I think us Americans who live here really highly value the NHS!

But I also fear for it. We’re already losing so many benefits. You now have to pay for some things that used to be free in the past. I hope this doesn’t expand too much. And some of the NHS is now contracted out to private companies. It’s a bit concerning because they don’t have control of all the aspects of the care.

I’ve been a patient myself many times and it hasn’t all been great. Several years ago, I got a urine retention due to a blockage and ended up here, in my local A&E. I came in on a Friday, got a catheter inserted, became an inpatient on the ward, but didn’t see a urologist until the following Tuesday, when I had a cystoscopy done – four days later. I was then kept in until Sunday, so a total of ten days. A week later, I was back in The Specialist hospital and I found myself having the same procedure again. Two cystoscopies in three weeks! And this because The Specialist hospital never received any information about the procedure. I didn’t think that was very great at all. But since then I’ve had lots of treatment here, including for heart problems, and I’ve been treated fabulously!

I would choose NHS over American care anyday!

As told to David Ingemarsson 2019.