Free Doctor On The Job by Richard Gordon Page B

administrative experience, the time, the intelligence which goes into such work studies. It is obviously far beyond someone of your limited capacities and restricted education, if I may say so.’
    ‘But it’s all so easy,’ Pip protested. ‘You start off by sacking all the porters in the pool. Say, a hundred. You create instead a small flying squad of experienced porters, with no duties but to rush anywhere they’re suddenly needed in the hospital. I sat all night going over the head porter’s records, until he left last year –’
    ‘Left? Nobody told me. He can’t possibly have left.’
    ‘And found that emergency calls for porters averaged ten point seven-five per day, less than one every two hours, you understand. Each job needed an average of five men and lasted an average of twenty minutes, so that five porters in the vast pool downstairs are, by simple arithmetic, kept in idleness for all but three of each twenty-four hours, while the remainder are kept in an idleness which is absolute.’
    Pip waited patiently for comment. But it seemed Mr Clapper was in no mood for statistics. ‘Will you kindly leave?’ he asked coldly.
    ‘You’re not interested?’ Pip asked in surprise.
    ‘Your function in the hospital is to represent the members of ACHE, not to teach me my job.’
    ‘I was only trying to help –’
    ‘This is a hospital , Chipps. You may not understand, but it is a place where ignorant meddling can be dangerous or even fatal.’
    ‘But won’t you even read it?’ Pip asked plaintively.
    ‘You can if you like leave your outpourings with Mr Grout.’ Mr Clapper made a gesture as though flicking water from his fingertips. ‘I would also remind you that even shop stewards are not above dismissal for meddling in activities beyond their abilities. Good morning.’
    Pip was at first mystified more than offended. He left the administration office and took the service lift, which contained half a dozen other porters, the remains of several wards’ breakfasts, a superior-looking girl with the library trolley, a man smoking a pipe selling newspapers, and a nurse with a woman at the extremity of pregnancy groaning in a wheelchair. He felt sudden resentment at such highhanded rejection of a scheme, worked out so painstakingly in Faith’s cubicle until they both dropped exhausted to sleep, which could save St Swithin’s and the National Health Service so many thousands of pounds. There was a more liberal mentality in the wards, he reflected. The humblest student daring to question a diagnosis or line of treatment was encouraged rather than squashed. Even Sir Lancelot Spratt, Pip recalled, would grunt and declare generously, ‘Well, a pup often smells a rabbit quicker than an old dog.’ And at that moment, to Pip’s alarm Sir Lancelot himself stepped impatiently into the waiting lift.
    Sir Lancelot did not notice his former examinee. His attention was distracted immediately by a small, grey-haired, seedy-looking, thin, coloured man in red-striped flannel pyjamas and a St Swithin’s-issue blue towelling dressing-gown, who pushed into the lift while the doors were starting to close.
    ‘Sir Lancelot Spratt –’ said the new arrival breathlessly, as they began to descend.
    ‘Correct.’ Sir Lancelot looked down at him, stroking his beard. ‘I know you, don’t I? One of the patients from Shoreditch?’
    ‘No, no, much farther,’ said the man in agitation. ‘From Shanka.’
    ‘That’s it. The case Professor Ding is waiting to perform a cardiac transplant upon.’
    ‘That is all wrong,’ he declared in an urgent low voice. ‘I am not his patient. I am his brother-in-law.’
    Sir Lancelot was puzzled. ‘The two conditions are not incompatible, I should imagine?’
    ‘But I am not ill. There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing whatever.’ The little man banged his chest hard, producing a drumlike noise. ‘You hear? I am as sound as a flea.’
    ‘But come! Professor Ding distinctly told me