Healthcare disgrace in the UK

Healthcare disgrace in the UK (Full Version)

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Politesub53 -> Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 8:54:09 AM)
Normally i am full of praise for the system we have. This though, is a disgrace. I suspect the main cause was due, in some way, to cost cutting exercises. In this day and age, to treat patients in this way is unacceptable. Cut out excess management and employ more nurses and cleaening staff. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7037657.stm

pahunkboy -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 8:56:30 AM)
we had this here. they say handwashing would fix it, as for me- i am perplexted over the unending list of recalls! come on 2007 we have food w saminella, ecoli! ? 2007! not 1807!

Politesub53 -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 8:58:54 AM)
Pahunk it seems some patients were left soiled with excrement. no amount of hand washing would fix that. This is down to general cleaning and care of both patients and facilities.

pahunkboy -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 9:08:22 AM)
nursing is a huge growth industry, Michigan is importing nurses from Ontario Canada. --excrement- ouch

susie -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 9:50:51 AM)
For me personally I have nothing but praise for the hospital staff where I have been treated. I spent just over a year in a hospital in Birmingham where I had the best care possible. Then recently I spent another month or so in a local hospital having a cancer operation followed up by care from community nurses and local GP. All of them were fantastic. What I did see though was the way the nurses were run off their feet with not enough staff to cope during the normal day. Until something is done about the management of hospitals nothing will change. The nurses and doctors, at the sharp end, really do do their best but it is the managers and accountants striving to constantly cut costs that effect things. We also have to remember that we as a country are putting more money into health care constantly but with the ever increasing number of new drugs and treatments available costs for providing the health care we get are also rising.

LadyEllen -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 10:30:26 AM)
I too object to the frequently multi-tiered management in hospitals and health trusts, headed by executives receiving large salaries. The argument is, that the health service must pay salaries competitive with the private sector, in order to get the best people at all levels. What this argument totally misses however, is the point that in order to offer the salaries available in the private sector, there is a continuous and urgent need to improve productivity in order to stay in business, and the salaries in the private sector reflect decades of such efficiencies in production. I see no evidence of any increased efficiency in the health service which might warrant that the salaries offered be competitive with the private sector. In fact, should competitive salaries be offered, then at very best what we are doing is recruiting the best and allowing them and encouraging them to do little. E

nyrisa -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 10:46:54 AM)
Just so I can understand the subject better, what is a health trust? Is it a hospital, or a nursing home (like for the aged or longterm care patients)?

LadyEllen -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 10:53:57 AM)
Hi Nyrisa - that is a mystery really, as to what a health care trust is, does, who they are and why? as I understand it (and its purely a guess), its a body which receives the tax funding from the government for a group of health care services in its area, and disburses the funds to those services - so each trust might be dealing with a thousand doctors' practices, one or two ambulance trusts, a few hospitals, several clinics etc. Assuming I have it right, then I can see some advantages in this - some facilities underspend and some overspend and funding can be switched round by central organisation. In theory there are also opportunities to save on staff - one set of admin people rather than these roles being duplicated at trust and hospital level for instance; but I dont see any of that being a reality since each hospital still needs its own admin and management and accounting. Still, it does provide for good jobs for the boys who cant make it in the real world, along with a new Mercedes every year or so. E

meatcleaver -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/11/2007 12:18:11 PM)
If you notice, most of these hygeine problems started in the NHS with the privatisation of the cleaning to outside companies who immediately lowered wages, cut staff and employed temporary workers instead. The wife of my former wife's cousin, who is a Dutch doctor worked in one of the Manchester hospitals and couldn't believe it when she found out the cleaners were given as list of jobs to do and they had to start at the top of the list each day regardless of whether they had finished the list or not. The result was that certain cleaning jobs were never done. When she complained to the manager, the manager simply said the cleaning company has a contract to fullfill, the manager of the cleaning company then said that if they didn't start at the top of the list each day, regardless of them not getting to the bottom of the list, they would not be fullfilling their contract and so would not be paid. The whole system is mad. Thankyou Margeret Thatcher and thankyou Tony Blair for not trusting the workforce and giving them mindless ill thought out targets that stop people from doing their jobs properly. The other problem is that Britain gets its healthcare on the cheap compared to other European countries. Nothing wrong with that if the reason for it is efficiency which is part of the answer but part of the answer is that Britain is getting what it pays for. The best thing that could be done is to get rid of the private companies and employ cleaning staff direct. I guess one of the problems here is the use of game theory for internal competition, it has never worked and never will, a high school student could tell you why, its easier to fiddle the books than fullfill your targets.

LadyEllen -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 3:12:26 AM)
My friend is a nurse - now in the private care sector but formerly in NHS hospitals. We were talking about this last night and she mentioned what used to happen very often because the private contractors didnt have cleaners to do the cleaning. Either facilities would remain dirty, or the nurses themselves had to clean them - and with 3 nurses for a ward of 40 patients, this obviously meant a reduction in nursing care. My view? If the owners of these private cleaning contracting companies cant get staff, its likely they dont pay enough - because of course they have cut prices to get the contract, or are creaming off very high profits. Either way, in my view its totally fucking irrelevant - they contracted to provide the service, so if the manager has to get out of bed at 2am and clean up because there are no cleaners available, thats what should happen. No excuses. It also makes me wonder why we are paying millions of people to sit at home and do nothing, when we need stuff like this done and its not getting done at wages comparable to social benefits for unemployment? Top up the dole of suitable unemployed people and get them down to the hospitals now - and I dont want to hear anything about the training required to push a mop. E

pahunkboy -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 4:46:18 AM)
there is a nice chunk of change to cleaning companies.

Aneirin -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 5:05:22 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LadyEllen What this argument totally misses however, is the point that in order to offer the salaries available in the private sector, there is a continuous and urgent need to improve productivity in order to stay in business, and the salaries in the private sector reflect decades of such efficiencies in production. E I think this is where the health service has it wrong, increasing productivity as if it were a factory.No,the health service is there to make people well, if that takes a long time then so be it, better the job done properly first time. I know the problems at the hospital highlighted by the OP was partly to do with the lack of care in everything, but I would like to see a regime of all hospital staff wearing hospital clothing,not their outside clothing, no jewellery and hair covered.My step mother lives in Sweden and there a nurse in a swedish hospital,they have wholly better standards than us and MRSA is virtually never heard of .Hey,and soon as you walk through the door, your senses are assailed by the smell of clean. As to the current scheme of things with British Hospitals,what the hell do we need executives for?If there is a need,the deciding qualification should be that they are medically trained and so know the requirements of a hospital. Anyway, would it not be better to go back to the old way of running a hospital with the scary matrons in charge. Yes,the hospital might be a money drain, but is that all that bad?

Aneirin -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 5:12:19 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LadyEllen ...... - and I dont want to hear anything about the training required to push a mop. E I know this sounds daft, but stangely for 'floor technicians', there is training to push a mop. The usual OTT health and safety lunacy applies to a cleaner, how to avoid back injuries so the cleaner does'nt sue the employer.Not sure if there is actually training into how to actually clean with a mop though.

LadyEllen -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 5:19:35 AM)
Hi Aneirin Just to clear up what I intended by efficiency in the health service - what I meant was, efficiency as a measure of patients dealt with per million pounds spent or similar, not efficiency in the sense of a hospital turning out dealt-with patients like a factory. Health care is exactly that - care, and it has to be of only one quality, high quality. Looking from outside the health service, and having seen the goings on within it through various documentaries, what strikes me is that there is nowhere near the administrative and managerial efficiency one finds in the private sector - the health service seems to be running with multiple levels of administration and management which were it a private sector organisation would bankrupt it in months. Efficiency as a measure of money spent is affected by the cost of this top heavy set up - removing millions of pounds from the activities which are the purpose of the organisation and so reducing efficiency enormously. But there are other problems. From what I've heard, nurses these days entering the profession must hold a university degree - which intrigues me somewhat as to why? Especially when we are importing nurses from all over the world who most likely do not hold such qualifications and no requirement is placed on them to acquire such. My friend who is a nurse, informs me that this is so that nurses can take over some activities formerly practiced only by doctors - because there are not enough doctors. Yet for these extra duties and responsibilities nurses receive no additional pay. Taken in the context of the huge debt involved in acquring a degree and the low salary offered by nursing, its no surprise that we are short of nurses. At the same time though, the government is pumping huge amounts into the service - and the service managers feel the need to spend it all so that they dont have the funding for the following year cut - so its my suspicions that they use the money up on the one form of personnel they can acquire - some more managers and administrators. And then they overspend, because nurses see whats happening and quit - and the hospitals have to fill the gaps with agency nurses at vastly increased cost. Its an absolute mess in my view. E

pahunkboy -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 7:18:05 AM)
The UK system sounds like Medicare. [depends on you locale if it is "good" as many DRs dont "participate" in it; as their costs cant be satisified on the set prices, they state that they are not accepting new patients]] I am not a nurse- but I would guess we badly need "nurse reform". The 2 years degree is phazed out replaced by 4 year. Many things they do are tasks so as to not be sued. As to the details- I could not guess.

meatcleaver -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 8:23:28 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: pahunkboy The UK system sounds like Medicare. [depends on you locale if it is "good" as many DRs dont "participate" in it; as their costs cant be satisified on the set prices, they state that they are not accepting new patients]] I am not a nurse- but I would guess we badly need "nurse reform". The 2 years degree is phazed out replaced by 4 year. Many things they do are tasks so as to not be sued. As to the details- I could not guess. Most of the problems being experienced in the British NHS are Thatcher's fucked up reforms (everything she touched she fucked up) and historic under investment. Blair to his credit did pour a lot of investment into the NHS but without reforming it and doing away completely with Thatcher's fuck ups and culling the management, he was onto a loser which he compounded by importing stupid management theories from America (sorry). Instead he should have looked at our European partners to see what they were doing right and then introduced what has proven to work.

LadyEllen -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 8:32:03 AM)
As usual on the subject of the bitch Thatcher MC, I agree interestingly, the doctor who assisted her in her reforms of the health service was a heroin addict throughout the period E

meatcleaver -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 8:34:26 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LadyEllen As usual on the subject of the bitch Thatcher MC, I agree interestingly, the doctor who assisted her in her reforms of the health service was a heroin addict throughout the period E Why am I not surprised to learn this?

Owner59 -> RE: Healthcare disgrace in the UK (10/12/2007 8:50:53 AM)
Nurses are heros.There`s no other way to put it.As kids,we thought of babys,and happy things being associated with nursing. But nursing,and being a nursing assistant,is one of the worlds dirtiest jobs.Hands down,they are angles of mercy. The hard fact is, that a lot of nursing involves the excreta of humanity,and loads of it. And they help us live with a measure of dignity,at "the end".Something,we all will face. We should all pray that we have a good nursing staff, during those final days.And hope stuff like this doesn`t happen here. Oh,it does happen here, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center,in eye shot of the capital......

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