ONE of my biggest pet hates is jargon and the NHS is absolutely riddled with it, something like a rotten floorboard infested with woodworm. I remember leaving my first NHS board meeting at Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester in a haze of gutwrenching panic and bewilderment.

What on earth were these men and women talking about? I hadn’t got a clue. I began to wonder if they knew what they were talking about. Were they speaking in tongues? Perhaps I was just really thick – a few of my old school teachers would nod their heads enthusiastically.

I felt like an archaeologist who had discovered hieroglyphics but without the benefit of the Rosetta Stone to decipher their meaning.

But I knew there was a treasure trove of information if I could just unlock the blasted thing.

Let me give a few befuddling examples from planet jargon. Last month, the NHS leaders in Worcestershire parked their top-ofthe- range Audis and BMWs and met amid much back-slapping and self-congratulation in the plush Duckworth Suite at Sixways Stadium in Worcester.

There, they told us the health service was up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Not that they actually said that. Or not in so many words. No.

They used phrases like creating a sustainable health service, “service reconfiguration” and “effective quality assurance of communication and engagement process”.

It makes you want to tear your hair out. No, actually, it makes you want to tear their hair out.

If there was such a thing as crimes against the English language this lot would all be serving life-sentences.

The NHS top brass spoke of opportunities, not cuts, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if the NHS in Worcestershire has to save between £150 and £200 million by 2015/16, then something has to give and it could well be something big.

Eamonn Kelly, chief executive of NHS Worcestershire, had the good grace to admit there would be difficult decisions ahead and that hospital beds could close, although no one can be sure until the review of services is actually finished in November what’s for the chop. A Worcestershire GP summed up the mood of the public in this “extraordinary tripartite board meeting” when he muttered that it was all a load of (sounds a bit like) “bullocks”.

This jargon literally infects every part of the NHS and, to a lesser extent perhaps, the whole of the public sector, not that there aren’t forthright, straight-talkers in the NHS. Dr Bryan Smith, former chairman of NHS Worcestershire, has always been an outspoken critic of gobbledygook and Harry Turner, of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, is in favour of a more direct approach.

When one of our reporters recently asked for information from the West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust about a road accident they were told by one of the press officers that the deceased had received “injuries incompatible with life”. I ask you, was there ever a worse description of death?

To find the stranglehold that jargon has on the NHS you only have to consult the board papers of the last two meetings of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

Terms include quality governance, serious untoward incidents, scheme of delegation, safeguarding, quality, improvement, productivity and performance (QIPP), board assurance framework, integrated CQC improvement plans, confidentiality and data protection assurance, and the absolute classic – relative risk of mortality using Dr Foster analysis methodology.

I could go on. I won’t. There are enough people in intensive care without me sending readers there myself by inducing a coma.

The point is that it all sounds like a load of rubbish.

The men in the sharp suits in the boardroom might as well just bark at the man in the street: “Oi! You!

Do you understand what I’m saying? No? Good!”

But it doesn’t sound like such a load of claptrap once you know what it means. For example, if you knew that serious untoward incidents (SUIs) referred to falls where elderly people had broken their hips or patients being given the wrong medication or a patient becoming seriously ill with a hospital infection.

The Dr Foster analysis methodology (yawn!) refers to how many people are dying in hospital above what you would expect.

That’s why I hate jargon – it hides things, important things, things you need to know, things about life and death.

A degree of technical language is to be expected in an entity as vast and unwieldy as the NHS, but at its worst this jargon is an utter violation of the majestic English language, a conscious attempt to confuse and mystify the ordinary man and woman. Everyone knows the phrase about “lies, damned lies and statistics”. I would add jargon into the bargain. Even if it’s not an outright porky, jargon is used to mask what’s really going on like a thick mist of utter meaninglessness.