British Intelligence Can Not Be Trusted.

Discuss.

Not only have I changed my routine because my grandmother's in hospital I also told everyone that I've changed my routine. So even though it made the police helicopter very angry I had no problem attending this afternoon's (1/9/11) meeting with the consultant, Dr Tan (Anglo-Chinese).

The second surprise of the afternoon was that what was billed as a quick chat with the consultant actually turned out to be a multi-disciplinary case conference with the nursing discipline and the physiotherapy discipline also represented. Crucially the psychiatric discipline was not represented which seemed a little remiss considering that like it or not dementia is classed as a psychiatric disorder. The business of the meeting though was no surprise; My grandmother must be put in a nursing home and her house must be sold to either the Notting Hill Housing Group (NHHG) or the Whitgift Estate. The opening pitch in this sale was that my grandmother suffers from dementia which is an irreversible condition that leaves her unable to care for herself and therefore requires 24 hour nursing care.

It was at this point that my father collapsed under the weight of complex medical terminology. It was lucky then that I was on hand to bring up the fact that the CT scans disprove the current vascular dementia diagnosis. Therefore what the multi-disciplinary team actually have is an elderly patient with a clutch of psychiatric symptoms that could equally be caused by a variety of psychiatric disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction or whatever words we're making up to label mental health problems these days. I then brought up the fact that my grandmother's results on the standard NHS memory test (whose medical acronym I appropriately enough can't remember) actually show an improvement thus disproving the assertion that my grandmother's condition is irreversible.

I also brought up the fact that there is, what was tactfully termed, "A factual inconsistency" between what both the Heavers Road and Queens memory teams had written in my grandmother's notes and what had actually taken place. My alleged refusal to allow my grandmother to be prescribed with anti-dementia drugs was cited as an example. As this part of the conversation was not had in a direct way the consultant initially challenged this by explaining that anti-dementia drugs are not licensed in the UK to treat my grandmother's condition but ended up only further underlining the fact that my grandmother's treatment is up to now is very hard to justify medically.

Eventually we ended up in a discussion of whether or not an independent psychiatric assessment was needed. The consultant was very opposed to this arguing that a non-specific infection (slightly elevated white blood cell count on blood test) would mean that any psychiatric assessment would be inconclusive at best. So I argued that my grandmother should be kept on the ward until that infection clears and a psychiatric assessment could be carried out. The consultant felt it would be a better idea to transfer my grandmother to another facility that is less equipped to moniter this infection and preform any psychiatric assessment there. This was mainly NHS code for; "Get her off my ward now!!!!!"

At this point everyone's pagers went off and the conference was hastily concluded with an un-solid promise to meet up again in a week in order to give physiotherapy time to conclude that there's nothing more they can do for my grandmother until she's been seen by a psychiatrist. Ideally one with experience in treating torture victims*.

As for the Paris conference on Libya it was a bit of a strange one. Britain and France called the summit during the fall of Tripoli so it was meant to be an opportunity to celebrate the collapse of the Libyan government and then divide up Libya's assets. As Muammer Qaddafi used the opportunity to appear almost live on a still functioning Libyan government TV station it was obvious to all that the Libyan government has yet to collapse. This left all the delegates at a loose end and desperately trying to make small talk which is possibly the most dangerous situation it is possible to have in international diplomacy.

So the French hosts threw a bit of a tantrum and what we got was a very media friendly spectacle of delegates from over 60 nations being sat in groups at tables of descending levels of importance (top table to back of room etc). This is very similar to the listening exercise rather then a public inquiry that Britain launched yesterday (31/8/11) to discover the causes of the August riots. Of course they could have used the opportunity to discuss how best to re-construct Libya after the war. However despite six months of meetings no-one in the Libya contact group has given that a second thought.

Also I personally think Sarkozy's current problem is that he's just angry that his actions against gypsy/travellers keeps getting compared to Britain's crimes at Dale Farm. There is of course many crucial difference and just think if I had more time I could try and explain them in something resembling coherent English so someone could attempt to translate them into something resembling coherent French.



*This shouldn't actually be too difficult to arrange. Croydon is also home to the Home Office reporting centre which deals with undocumented immigrants claiming political asylum often on the grounds of torture. So there are actually quite a few psychiatrists knocking about who have treated torture victims before.