Turner, 75, spends two days a week driving patients, and said he started volunteering to “try and give something back to the NHS, albeit in a very modest way”.<\/p>\n
He is one of 17 volunteer discharge drivers, who are only paid for their fuel and mileage. <\/p>\n
As well as driving patients around, they help settle them into their homes, checking heating, lights, and water are up and running if they have had a long stay in hospital. <\/p>\n
“People have had their [electricity] meters run out while they’ve been in hospital,” Turner explained, adding that “when you’re feeling a bit frail and uncertain, it’s nice to have somebody there to help”.<\/p>\n
He said the patients he transported sometimes “think they’ve got to pay” for the service, adding that he is “very pleased to tell them, good old NHS, it’s free”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Turner, 75, spends two days a week driving patients, and said he started volunteering to “try and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-345213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}