Hospitals Decrease Waiting Times With Help Of CERN
Hinchingbrooke and Addenbrookes hospitals have revealed a brilliant new plan to cut A&E waiting times, with the help of rumoured-to-be-local Expert Scientists, CERN.
While waiting times have fallen dramatically in the last few years, NHS chiefs are said to be concerned that patients – and more importantly, those hanging about in waiting rooms while their more inept friends and family members are treated – still think of a time quoted in hours and minutes as a long wait.
Former maternity spokesman Mike Primark, recently promoted to management and charged with improving patient perception of wait times, agreed to speak exclusively to the Citizen.
“Our waiting times have been steadily coming down for the last ten years, and we’ve also made the waiting rooms much prettier and out Lego in them and stuff to keep people amused,” said Primark, “but people still seem to measure whether the wait was acceptable or not by how many coffees they managed to drink, how many packets of crisps they got through, and how many copies of Chat they thumbed through whilst waiting for their friend or brother or cousin or whoever managed to drop a piano on their toes or whatever.”
The crisps and magazines were easy to remedy. “First, we threw out all those rubbish women’s weeklies you normally see littering the place, and replaced them with much thicker reading material. The Sunday Times is particularly good for sucking people into a coma without them noticing, and then even though they’ve been in A&E for three hours, they’ve only read two sections – about 4% of the paper – so it seems like they’ve been in for about fifteen minutes.”
Primark detailed how they replaced all the vending machine snacks with family-sized bags, so that you’d be full before purchasing that third bag of Starburst.
But the real challenge came from the hot beverages. “We’ve had the same old coffee machines for years,” said Primark, “which dispense a range of teas and coffees which all taste of cardboard, some liquid alleged to be soup, and a nasty sickly brown substance which we refer to as hot chocolate.
“The problem is, people soon notice if they are dispensed more than a 6oz cup, as they need the loo more. The only way to remedy this is to make each drink take longer to drink, by making it hotter, so people have to wait longer for it to cool.”
This is where CERN stepped in, said hapless spokesman Guillaume la Trec, 51. “We used our useless Large Hadron Collider to develop a process for heating water above 100º,” said la Trec, “without it turning into a gas. Basically, there are some very complicated formulas and equations and stuff which I won’t bore you with, but when you mix the water with the ground cardboard used to make all the drinks in these Klix machines, it can hold a temperature of 132.2ºc. This takes about half an hour to cool down to drinking temperature, meaning most ‘service users’ only ave time for one or two coffees, rather than the usual ten.”
“Fucking brilliant,” commented Addenbrookes A&E receptionist, Lottie Marlborough-Light, 22. “Now I won’t have chavvy fourteen-year-old mummies complaining that they’ve been waiting nine cups and three Snickers for their Darren to get his face stitched up. Marvellous.”
The scheme will be trialled at the two hospitals before being rolled out nationwide, if people don’t notice.
