The government will try and blame the failure of Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust on the NHS. The public won't buy it.
Last week was a momentous one for the NHS. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s announcement on Lewisham Hospital occupied all corners of the press.
Added to this we had the action of Lord Owen, who joined the March to save Lewisham Hospital and launched his Amendment Bill to re-instate the core principles of the NHS and protect services from marketisation.
The Labour Party and the National Health Action Party have declared their support – and in the face of the current assault on the health service by the coalition it is a much needed move from within the parliamentary portals.
To return to the outside world, now that the reality of Hunt’s decision about the Lewisham hospital #Lewishambles has started to embed itself in the national reality it’s time to cast our eyes further afield.
Not only have we witnessed the government announcing their decision to dismantle a brand new, successful and solvent A&E and accompanying acute facilities in Lewisham, but we can now see that the whole A&E system is about to be dragged into it’s very own emergency situation.
To look at the specifics: The coalition has missed its own reduced waiting time targets for the last 17 consecutive weeks, with an extra million patients waiting more then four hours.
Even worse, the ambulance back-up situation is nearing breaking point, with patients waiting for up to 11 hours in ambulances before entering A&E (moreover, I have just heard of one elderly patient waiting in an ambulance for over 18 hours).
In some regions, fewer than seven in 10 ambulance calls are reaching the most serious cases within the eight minute target – and more than 11,138 ambulances are waiting over 30 minutes outside of A&E departments.
Far from protecting the NHS – 5,000 nursing jobs have been lost since David Cameron became PM and one in six hospitals now have inadequate staffing levels in A&E – the government is plowing on with a wholesale destabilisation of the NHS and lying about it.
Tomorrow we will see the release of the long awaited Francis Report, which is sure to reveal shocking levels of maladministration and malpractice in Mid-Staffordshire Trust – which was overseen by the current NHS CEO, Sir David Nicholson.
With the pressures which the current regime are placing on the system it’s likely there will be more rather than less terrible instances like that seen in Mid-Staffs.
However, if the government see fit to try to use this to smear the NHS, they may find the public aren’t so easily duped.
38 Responses to “The public won’t be fooled by the government on the NHS”
LB
The right too. I had one MP, Steve Baker, expend all his energy trying to find me in his electoral register so he could refuse to answer the question on how much they owe for the pensions.
John Redwood made it an election pledge. Repeatedly pushed him since the election. He thens says, its been published, but won’t say where, and “Its not the way it works”. Hmmm.
Well the way its going to work, is you won’t get the 20p in the pound that the state pension pays out.
If you take a median wage earner, and back test NI contributions in the FTSE against the state pension, that 26K a year worker has lost 430,000 pounds.
Not surprisingly, they won’t discuss the loss.
blarg1987
I assume you work in the NHS from yourt first hand experiences?
However to play devils advocate how many fall under DR at the patients request?
I only ask as like with alot of surveys etc it is all the data not necessarily the actual number believed killed by accident etc.
LB
Well, the NHS estimate is 20-80,000 a year where the NHS contributes to the death.
Personally, I’ve known 4 killed. One I put as murder. The surgeon made such serious errors, and then bumped up the morphine dose to dispatch them. Notes disappeared, ….
Another, friend was killed by errors, 1 week after giving birth.
Another friend, brain dead, died 4 days latter because they intubated him for an operation into his stomach, not airway, and didn’t monitor his O2 levels even though he had turned blue.
Next died of toxic shock after being sent home from A&E. Didn’t do a simple blood test.
The guy I sit next too stopped a nurse from overdosing and killing his daughter with chemo drugs. End result, they shut down the ward.
All anecdoctal, but combine that with what we know about Stafford, and all the others. They didn’t even detect the biggest mass killer in the UK either.
However to play devils advocate how many fall under DR at the patients request?
Not a case where errors contribute, so doesn’t get included. Oh, I get it, you want to diminish the effect of LCP, bumping people off without their permission.
So if someone has DNR, and dies, but didn’t give permission, that’s murder isn’t it? Or if the doctor is lucky, manslaughter. So where are the prosecutions?
blarg1987
It depends on who gave the permission i.e. if the patientis of sound mind and requests DNR but family do not then would that be murder if the patient is of sound mind?
Just to clarify the friend who was brain diead was that a result of what had happened or brain dead beforehand or after the operation as it sounds a litttle confusing.
I am not saying mistakes are not made like with organisation, question is how does it comapre with other countries?
LB
Nope, it was the anesthetist who killed him. If you intubate someone for an operation, the tube goes into their airway, not into their stomach. Your chest may look like its going up and down, but that is just your stomach inflating. Your lungs get no oxygen. So you should monitor the patients O2 levels. If they drop, you know something is wrong. If they go blue, something has gone very wrong. They did neither for 4 minutes, by which time he was brain dead.
It’s the only case where they admitted to the error. The others, in one case the family gave up after the medical tribunal which I did (the GPs also made errors, and all 4 resigned from the NHS). However, the surgeon was the real problem. His level of incompetence was the equivalent of not washing your hands.
The others are going through the judicial process. One will cost the NHS millions. If you kill, as Newsbot puts it, a 0.1%er, you’re liable for a lot of money.
What’s the reason for the comparison with other countries? 20,000 a year not enough? Pre LCP by the wya.
So of sound mind, are the relatives allowed to collude with doctors to bump the patient off?
So of sound mind, are the doctors allowed to bump them off with or without permission?
Either’s murder in my book, manslaughter at the minimum.
However, its the NHS, and you can’t criticise the NHS because its a sacred cow. Well one of those has been slaughtered today with Stafford, and its going to keep on coming.
Notice that the left’s attitude is interesting, even yours, because you’re trying to distract it by roping other countries in to excuse the killing. They will go that its isolated, and a few heads at the top should roll. However, its endemic. It’s across the whole board. Remember until now, the only one I’ve seen convicted have been nurses. One who was like Shipman bumping them off for pleasure, and another who starved a patient to death. There has been one prosecution, for the case at Queen Mary’s in Sidcup.