On The Road

Travel has possessed its own challenges from staying in communication to the weather itself, as Dennis Cox recounts:
I wasn't quite sure what it did apart from being able pick those people at 35 + who needed a smear And, you know, we were proud of it [laughs] and we were also proud of putting our notes in alphabetical order and we were also proud, and then treasury tagging them and putting a little hole in each corner treasury tagging because, you know, in some practices it was just like shuffling cards, but in these old, old Lloyd George envelopes.

 So those were the, you know,  actually summary, you know, if you have ever, if I think about those, things we went through over those years which was just, you know, ordering your notes. Getting the write order. Getting some of the paperwork to, to thinning it out a little bit. Then the big thing was summarizing them and going through the notes. These were all extra tasks you did on top of a busy, you know, it was often doctors. So, at the early days it was doctors who did it. You know, later we trained people to do the summarizing, but you know, but it was a real task then.

 You know, I think for future generations will find it hard to imagine how doctors knew who needed vaccination, who didn't, whose test results were through things like that. So the future generations will find it hard to imagine the work involved with filing. You know, actually getting results on paper, creating actions, getting those actions through on paper actually the  paper based visit systems to make sure that everybody, all the visits had been ticked off, what was the method, you know, accepting the visits. I remember, you know, a really bad day of visits would be when an extra sheet was sellotaped on the bottom of the [laughs] visit book. Um cause of course, you know, future generations won't realise that doctors used to do these things called home visits then, you know, a lot.

We did a lot of home visits. We never refused a home visit. So, you know, so in the typical day then was quite it was, it was quite, it was, it was ok I, I think it got more intense as things, time went on. And it had a pace to it, you know, we, when I started, I think we were, we would combine with other practices in a rota so there'd be the St Ives rota so that would be about four, four practices joining together. I can't remember how, how often we'd be on call. Maybe one night in ten something like that. Not, [clears throat] not terribly onerous, but hard when you did it.

And remember when we went out.Well there was two things. When you went out your wife or your partner, be often the wife then it was the wife who was trapped at home because she couldn't, we'd there was no mobile phones so she couldn't leave the phone unmanned. So I'd be only the one on a weekend, when I was on call, would be the only one who could go and get groceries or something like that, she'd be, and then we were, you know, my poor wife would be trying to bath the children and the phone would be ringing and then she's completely untrained, but having to actually do some assessment or and then somehow get hold of me. And she'd get hold of me by bleeping me and then I would find a telephone usually in the patient's house to phone back and get the details of the next, of the next call.

And also, I really, it was so difficult, and I remember like on a snowy windy night when I'd lived, I lived in Bluntisham, you know, I'd got out to see, to see a child with earache, for example, with a, you know, with a shovel in the back of the [car] and wellington boots and going down these country roads thinking actually if I go off into the ditch or something like that I've no way of telephoning anybody to tell them what had happened., Jill doesn't know where I've gone. No, no there's record of where I'm going to. Where I'm going, you know. It was quite, it was quite different, you know.

It was quite quite different.