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In our hard-pressed NHS, must sympathy be rationed too?

A toxic mixture of cost-cutting and ideology seems to have put a limit on tea and sympathy

2 August 2014

9:00 AM

2 August 2014

9:00 AM

Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from people of all ages and types. The other week I saw an elderly Middle Eastern man bent over a bin in a ward corridor, crying almost uncontrollably. I asked him the problem and he stuttered out that he had been watching his daughter sleeping, and he believed she was going to die.

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