Women's activism in cardiac arrest

If women’s activism were medicine, what kind of doctor would you be?

Every hospital is full of good people. Qualifications, badges, clipboards. People who genuinely think they’re helping. And a fair few rainbow lanyards we all secretly can’t stand, though that’s not really relevant here, you know the type and we’ll move on. Anyone who’s ever sat in A&E for six hours knows that being surrounded by professionals doesn’t actually mean you’re getting better. A hospital can be heaving with activity while the patient dies quietly in the corner.

A hospital doesn’t exist to employ doctors. It doesn’t exist to build bigger waiting rooms, or produce more paperwork, or hold conferences about illness. It exists to make itself unnecessary. If the wards never empty and the ambulances keep coming and the waiting list gets a bit longer every single year, nobody throws the hospital a party. They start asking why so many people are still getting sick in the first place.

That’s more or less where a lot of women’s activism has ended up, if I’m honest.

Activism isn’t there to produce more activists. It’s not there to keep organisations afloat, fill conference halls, print newsletters, or fund permanent careers in campaigning — those things are only worth anything if they get us closer to actually winning. Somewhere in the last decade or two, quite a lot of people started mistaking “busy” for “working.”

Take the triage nurses first. They don’t fix anything, they just decide whether your problem is worth treating at all. Is this really discrimination. Is this really happening. Is this really the hill to die on. By the time they’ve finished deliberating over whether you’re ill enough to be seen, you’re usually a good deal worse than when you walked in.

Then the GPs, and God, the GPs. Every visit ends the same way — let’s monitor it, let’s gather a bit more evidence, let’s wait for the review, let’s see what the next government says. There’s always another appointment booked, and the cure is permanently six months out. If women’s rights vanished at the speed an NHS referral moves we’d all be a lot calmer about it, frankly, because nothing would ever actually happen.

There’s a palliative care wing too.