I was admitted to hospital during one of the Junior Doctors Strikes. Typically you have a doctor that will refer you to consultants for specialist investigations. It is then upto the doctor to make the decision about what happens next.

Adding a junior doctors strike makes the last part difficult as it is typically Junior Doctors that make those decisions.

In my case there was a 24 hour period in which no decisions were made. This meant I could not be discharged from the Hospital. Eventually I chose to self discharge rather than spend Christmas in a state of limbo (in addition to the sleep deprevation that an extended hospital stay involves).

If the government does not want to settle the strike then something must happen to improve the decision making process.

King Canute is famous for failing to stop the tide by just sitting there.

The truth was it was a deliberate demonstration of the limitations of his own ability.

Our government is about to find out the same lesson. If you find a fact that you don’t like you can’t just legislate it away.