Calling in the cavalry

Second strike

I recently published an article with the excellent Dispatch media, going to war with my local wheelchair services.

Well, The Guardian read it, and they liked it, and have republished it in a slightly expanded form today.

I was lying on my back in an east London hospital, sometime in August 2023. I don’t know what day it was, exactly; by that point I’d mostly given up caring. My phone rang. I managed to answer, even though I had largely lost the use of my hands. (Luckily, a member of staff had left it lying on my chest.) Also, I wasn’t feeling great. In the early stages of coming to terms with the fact I was paralysed, I had just been informed that the doctors wanted to drill a hole directly into my guts, inserting a plastic tube to drain away my urine, effectively making my penis redundant. It was proving quite a lot to take in.

Nonetheless, I answered.

The person on the other end said they were calling from my local wheelchair service. I sort of registered this was important. By this point, I’d started to get my head around the fact I was never going to walk again. Wheelchairs were going to be a big part of my life. But given I wasn’t going to be discharged from hospital for at least six months, I figured the local wheelchair service could wait until I was a bit more up for the conversation. I apologised, probably somewhat incoherently, and said I wasn’t able to talk right then. I assumed they would understand it wasn’t a good time, and call back later.

I assumed wrong.

A month or so went by. My mum was down from Merseyside, staying in my old flat in north-east London while I remained in hospital. (I never saw that flat again. The stairs made it just another inaccessible location for me, my former home part of a cut-off world.) She checked the post and found a letter from AJM Healthcare’s Waltham Forest wheelchair service, a regional subsidiary of AJ Mobility Ltd – described in its annual report as “leading integrated wheelchair service provider for the NHS, delivering services to a population base of over 8.1 million people”. The letter stated that because AJM had been “unsuccessful in our attempts to contact you … your referral has now been closed”. In other words, because I had failed to engage on the phone the one time that it called me, I had been removed from the waiting list for a wheelchair.

Just to spell that out: I was in hospital, paralysed. I could not leave hospital until I had a wheelchair. The local wheelchair service notified me that I wouldn’t be getting a wheelchair, after speaking to me on the phone for less than 30 seconds. It did so by writing to my home address. Which I could not reach, because I was in a hospital. Without a wheelchair.

So began my involvement with England’s wheelchair services, the patchwork of private companies contracted by the NHS to provide disability equipment to some of the people who need it most. It would prove to be quite a ride.

You can read the full version here. And this time you don't have to sign up. So no more excuses!