Has It Come To This

I see in passing that the headline on the Mail is about Bulgarian and Romanian staff coming to the UK to join the NHS who cannot speak English. Apparently the notable socialist, Professor Winston thinks this will compromise patient safety.

Has our country really come to this, that a newspaper has to headline a Professor saying such a blatantly obvious truth? Are the bureaucrats responsible for running the killing machine known as the National Health Service, so tied up with their arcane processes and rules (all thought up to keep them in work) that they cannot see the wood for the trees?

Is it really so unapparent to these people that the organisation, once believed to be for the care and recovery of the sick, that they should be focussed on patients? Mind you that is probably still to wide a remit for them to do something useful. Should I more accurately say the provision of timely and appropriate attention to the health of the patients as they arrive?

Let me give you a vignette of a personal tragedy and you can see where the NHS lets us down. My mother suddenly developed a problem in that she lost the power to walk whilst waiting to cross the road outside her house. She also had a 'dropped shoulder' and some other minor symptoms. On entering 'the system' she was told that as she had had a minor cancerous lump previously (on her leg, removed by surgery) it was 'probably cancer'. So she started a series of many visits to hospital to be prodded and sampled, being told variously over several months that she had cancer everywhere and finally that she had no cancer at all.

She was then handed over to neurology who diagnosed the problem the instant they saw her. Treatment; massive doses of steroids to be commenced as soon as possible (though that opportunity had now been missed). She had a fall at home and couldn't get up so was put into a care home where she had a fall (answer to written complaint, it was her fault and it was a controlled fall observed by two staff and the bruising was what should be expected) and became dehydrated (again 'her fault'; water was available).

She was then taken into hospital to deal with the dehydration where she got 'an infection' and died. It was suggested that it was just one of those things. no-one mentioned a hospital acquired superbug and the death certificate said septicaemia (which is blood poisoning without saying what caused it, like perhaps MRSA. But the authorities were trying hard at the time to reduce the statistics on deaths from hospital bugs, though possibly less hard on reducing the actual deaths).

What happened to treating the whole patient? Why the fixation, for months with cancer only to find it wasn't that? Why the compartmentalising of symptoms and over such a long time? Why the appalling lack of basic nursing care? It is clear though, that the self-serving, rude and blatant lies in management responses to complaints are a key to the problem. I am also suspicious that the cause of death was less than truthful which means that doctors now have to lie too.

Whether the NHS model is the best one for providing healthcare is a big question, but we also have to cure the managerialism that has destroyed the whole point of healthcare at the most basic level. It has come as a result of Tony Blair's belief that giving institutions large sums of money and leaving what they spend in on up to them, is a sensible way to behave. The damage that man did is inestimable.