50 can be regarded as quite an important number. It is the number of runs that most England batsmen could only dream of in the recent Test series in Australia. It is the number of Shades of Grey that someone has made a tidy living out of describing and according to Paul Simon it is the number of ways to leave your lover.
For a number of people outed in the response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it is the number of times each year that they visit A&E.
A quite surprising 12,000 visited the same A&E Department at least 10 times during the year. That is not that there is one very busy A&E department hosting the same 12,000 visitors at least 10 times each during any given year but rather that there are 12,000 people, each of whom visited an A&E department and returned to that same A&E department a further 9 times during last year.
Their efforts however are frankly pathetic in comparison to the herculean efforts of about 150 souls who managed an average of just shy of a visit a week to A&E. Now I have been a PI Lawyer for 18 years and so I have seen my fair share of unfortunates who have had an accident and on occasions over that period, maybe more than one accident, yet none of those people come close to the numbers of the 150.
In any cohort of people however, there are always the stand out individuals. We can only imagine what reasons lay behind the 223 times someone went to the Northern General hospital in Sheffield.
The top performer identified was someone at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital who managed a quite incredible 234 visits during the year. Reports that he is in fact the Chief of Emergency Medicine at the trust and simply clocks in at the wrong desk are not believed to be accurate.
How will these people fare in 2014?
We wait to see what happens.
Waldrons Solicitors Blog 