MAGA STRUCTURE

I'd been sick the day before Oliver's birth and hadn't eaten anything at all for 24 hours during the labour, during which time I'd been standing up in the overly warm Delivery Room 1, attending to Celia. As a result, I actually collapse and black out, twice, and am rushed to A&E for a rapid-fire battery of tests. Again, I'll skip details, but after a anti-sickness jab I was able to eat some food, get an hour's kip and rejoin the labour. Celia is simply amazing, heroic, all the way through this, just as she had been during pregnancy and just as she continues to be.




But such is the seriousness of the situation at the time, in order to get from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the A&E at the adjoining main UCLH building, I travel in an ambulance. Ludicrously, the one-way system around UCLH, and its dense traffic, means the hospital journey takes 10 minutes, even though it is 100 metres away. This is a condition often experienced in London traffic, a distortion of space and time that would be fascinating were it not so irritating. Most Londoners will have experienced the sheer helpless frustration of being stuck in a tunnel on the tube, unable to just get out and walk. Few 'urban transport solutions' place the passengers in such a futile position as London's extremely deep tube. I didn't think it at the time, but being strapped to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance was essentially the same condition as travelling underground. London's transport can just enfeeble sometimes. Were Londoners a more sensible, calm people, these delays might induce a zen-like state throughout the city, as people enjoy the enforced meditation. Though if they were a more sensible, calm people, they wouldn't have got things into this mess in the first place.



Wired to the wall in UCLH, with tubes emerging from my hand and tiny heart-trace monitors stuck all over my body, I realised we'd been in the new UCLH building before, for a scans 6 weeks and at 20 weeks. It's a giant complex, replacing an entire series of hospital buildings in central London, including the old Middlesex Hospital at Mortimer Street (originally founded 1745; rebuilt 1928) that S used to work at, several floors underground.



The new UCLH rises at the top of Gower Street in green and white, as if dressed in surgical robes. I'm not a huge fan of the building. Strapped to its wall, I begin to feel at one with it, but that's quite different.

What really lets the place down is the service design job, or rather, lack of it. It's as if the contractors left the building once the basic structure had been done. After that, little care appears to have been given to use of space, signage, design of systems etc. The food in vending machines is uniformly terrible - how can a hospital be selling crisps, fizzy drinks, powdered soups and chocolate bars? There are fabulous views east from the floor-to-ceiling window by the lifts, but a bizarrely hidden door entry system to the Early Pregnancy Unit 10 paces in the other direction. The 'Enter' button is actually positioned around a wall, away from the door. Moreover, the receptionist on the other side has to leave her chair to press the 'door open' button. When you're at the EPU reception, there is only room for 3 people to sit. On the mornings we'd there, months before, there were 10 or 12 waiting for an appointment, so we have to overflow into an unused seminar room opposite, arranging the chairs into an impromptu waiting room. Another morning, however, this seminar room is in use. For a seminar. So we stand, or sit in the ward itself, as bed-ridden patients have consultations around us. On one occasion, we have to sit in a storage cupboard to wait to receive some results. And this, in an area allegedly designed for pregnant women. There were several other system faults that are really too tiresome to explain.