Although of a very different kind, this sorry affair does cause me to recall that it was 50 years ago that I appealed to all members of the new National Assembly to re-consider the then policy of expelling from school every girl who became pregnant.
In both instances the end result was and is that the poor girl’s hope of obtaining a decent education were terminated or severely set back. It seems that we have barely progressed! But then we also have a Princess Marina Hospital which appears, over the years, to have regressed, rather than improved. Now we have patients who rarely get washed, patients whose results take forever to appear and patients who rarely see a doctor. Sometime, today or was it yesterday, was International Nurses Day – the Lady with the Lamp, compassion, care and love – and all that stuff of long ago. Do you remember? Of course not. A foolish question because it must have been in the 1970s that the nurses wrested control from the doctors, broke free and effectively declared their independence. And since then, of course, they have had total control over the entire national medical service.
