IS LAUGHTER the best medicine? Can you get it on the National Health Service? Apparently, yes, if you’re an over-stressed nurse on the frontline of hospital care.
A company called HumourUs is offering courses to give hospital staff a more positive outlook while on duty.
Sounds like they must first put aside grumbles about low pay and being assaulted in A&E. Not to mention being routinely patronised by junior doctors 10 years younger than themselves.
However, it’s not about doing the full Bernard Manning northern stand-up routine as you give a bed bath, but rather putting nurses in a good mood to face the trials and tribulations of the working day.
It’s light years across the space and time continuum from when I had my tonsils out in Providence Hospital, St Helens, circa 1968.
It was grumpy nuns, rather than grumpy nurses who were the order of the day. Laugh? I could have died.
After having had a scalpel wielded on the back of my throat during general anaesthetic, I was told to stop being a cry-baby. Their advice was to listen to Lily the Pink, by The Scaffold, to cheer us up.
This had been bought by the ward sister after 32 of us patients had gathered round a tiny black and white TV set on a Thursday evening to watch Top of the Pops.
After five days of listening to this record non-stop, I was ready for psychiatric therapy, never mind a tonsillectomy.
My only other stay in hospital has been on maternity wards, where the midwives’ idea of cheering you up was to announce an extra helping of prunes and castor oil.
This would be the earthy humour to beat those post-birth blues and blockages. Hilarious.
I was always tempted to say that a double gin and tonic, plus an anaesthetic until the child was 18 years old, would cheer me up even more.
Hospital humour is still based on the template laid down more than 40 years ago by Carry on Matron and Doctor in the House.
Goings-on in the sluice rooms between a randy young medic (played by Jim Dale) and a scantily clad nurse (bubbly Babs Windsor, natch) was the humorous prescription of yesteryear.
Illnesses were never more serious than a bad back (usually Frankie Howerd’s) or a boil on the bottom (Sid James’s), yet always necessitating the dramatic entrance of Matron Hattie Jacques with a giant syringe and an air of grim intention.
In contrast, today’s hospital dramas are all flat-lining and crash teams without a bed-pan in sight. More’s the pity.
There’s no room for humour in these crucial TV tales, as Mr Bill Rodgers, founder of HumourUs, says: “We tell nurses that humour is a very serious business. Children laugh 400 times a day, but adults only 40 times.”
In the case of nurses, that’s probably for the reasons outlined at the start.
He adds: “It’s better to have infectious laughter than an infectious superbug on the wards.”
Really, Bill? You don’t say. Nurse, the screens! Or do I mean the screams?
