Let’s not take this lying down!

I’m convinced that anyone working as a manager in the NHS must undergo a sense of humour bypass as a condition of employment. A classic case of this policy is the po-faced wankers in charge of the Great Western Hospital in Swindon.

Recently a group of seven doctors and nurses who were whiling away a few hours during a quiet period on the night shift in the A&E department decided to snap some photos of themselves playing ‘The Lying Down Game’ which they then posted on Facebook. The Lying Down Game is a slightly pointless but harmless bit of nonsense whereby people post photos of themselves lying face down in a variety of situations. A stupid but harmless activity.

The group of doctors and nurses were probably bored witless having already dealt with the usual rush of drunks and chavs that pitch up in casualty most nights of the week. Perhaps to relieve the boredom they decided to take pictures of themselves lying face down on a resuscitation trolley, a ward floor and on the hospital’s air ambulance heli-pad.

It was a pointless and infantile thing to do but not as pointless and infantile as the fuckwits running the hospital who decided to suspend the Swindon Seven. Frankly, if I worked in Swindon I imagine The Lying Down Game would be a welcome distraction. Let's face it, Swindon’s the kind of place where people watch the traffic lights change for entertainment. It’s hardly in with a chance to win Britain’s City of Culture Award, is it?

So why have the managers suspended a group of highly trained workers over such a trivial matter? The official reason given is that old chestnut of ‘Elf and Safety’. Apparently infection control regulations were breached as well as the NHS code of staff conduct. Oh dear… someone’s going to have to wipe the grass heli-pad down with Detox because someone laid down on it for five seconds. The management admitted that the prank didn’t involve patients and at no time was patient care compromised... so where’s the bloody problem?

I seriously doubt that infection control was an issue since doctors and nurses are perfectly capable of rubbing down a trolley with disinfectant. No, the real reason for this overreaction is down to the moronic administrators in charge of the hospital. They were probably wetting themselves in case a civil servant or politician held them responsible for the prank and sacked them from their cosy overpaid sinecure and stripped them of their gold-plated pension. God how I wish I were a doctor with one of those bureaucrats lying on my operating table. I’d give them a nice long taste of The Lying Down Game.

I was going to say something about what sort of people manage to slither their way into positions of managerial responsibility in the NHS but I think we already know the answer to that. The humourless automatons, some of them on salaries of around £200,000 a year (and yet who probably choose to holiday in a caravan) are the sort of puritanical pond life that make living in this country such a miserable pain in the backside.

However, my bile is mainly reserved for the whistle-blowing Stasi-style snake that took the time and trouble to report the photos posted on Facebook to management. What sort of bedwetting, mouth-breathing retard would do a thing like that? Have we sunk so low and become a nation of sneaks and snitches?

On second thoughts, don’t answer that…