Blindness

Hello everyone, my name is councillor Melvin Collins. I'm a councillor for Brentford Ward of the London Borough of Hounslow. I've served on the council from 1990 to 2002 and from 2010 to the present time. My main interest is scrutiny and I'm very proud and honoured as a blind person to be the current chair of Northwest London Shaping a Healthier Future in their joint health overview and scrutiny panel which is a panel covering eight boroughs. I also sit on children and young people scrutiny, health and adult care scrutiny and housing and environment scrutiny. Over the years I've served on a number of voluntary organisations. I've been blind since birth and was educated in a school for the blind called Dalton House. For my employment, I started off as an engineer. I spent 11 years working for Evershed and Vignals in Chiswick, but I then spent 30 years and 5 months working for Barclays Bank as a telephonist, a customer service advisor and then finally a client executive advisor in Premier Banking in Moorgate. My recent patient experience in West Middlesex was quite traumatic. In as much as being a blind person, the first thing that I found difficulty with was persuading the nurses that I knew my own level of dosage of eye drops and the times that I should be using them. I was politely told, you're not in Moorfields now, you're in West Middlesex, you do as I say and not as you want. So therefore, one drop I have to have access to all of the time, I couldn't get. My other experience was the way in which I was actually led to the toilet. I couldn't persuade them to actually hold me in the correct manner because obviously they had not been taught. This led to, one morning, I actually crashed into a Zimmer frame and hit the foot that I was actually in hospital for. That kept me in hospital for another two days and wasted money on an x-ray which would have been totally unnecessary. The other thing was that being under a specific surgeon in the hospital I was not allowed either access to him although I knew that he was in the hospital twice on a Tuesday and on a Saturday morning and also I had no access to the vascular nurse for dressing the wound that I had. In my role as a scrutiny member we've made a great deal of play of how to treat patients in a hospital setting. One of the amazing things that I found that except for the tablets my lunches, my breakfast and my evening meal were put on a tray miles miles away from me, and I had to wait until somebody could come and move the trays so that I could enjoy, or otherwise, the meal that was in front of me. The other irksome thing was you were not allowed to vary the diet. So the problem I had, as I'm allergic to things like mayonnaise, and I have a distinct dislike to spicy foods that often I had to have a boring old jacket potato with grated cheese because they would not either get a dietitian to help me or listen to any variations on the diet. The biggest advice that I'd give to any disabled person whether they're blind or have any disability that's not necessarily noticeable, although obviously blindness should be, is to make sure that when you go into A&E or wherever that they are acutely aware that you have a disability and to make sure that people, whether there's new staff coming on to the ward, that they are aware of the difficulties that you have as an individual and in my case I have a wife who has a disability and they catered for her not one jot nobody would show her out of the ward she had to find her own way into the ward and and one day when she came to the hospital she was left waiting for a porter to bring her up to the ward for 40 minutes and so I lost my visiting time with her and I think that that was an absolute disgrace. So I think one of the messages I would have for patient and staff alike is to know your disability, understand your disability and make sure that the people around you also know and understand to the best of their ability in the time that they have available to make your stay in hospital as comfortably as it possibly can be.