Less Nanny, More Matron Please
BBC NEWS | Health | Hospitals 'do not probe drinking'
Most A&E departments in England do not identify problem drinkers or offer them long-term help when they seek treatment, a study says...This did not appear to affect treatment on the spot, but meant people were not offered sources of long-term help.
Of course while Nanny is worrying about the demon drink she can't deal with:
Patients pay the ultimate price for NHS errors, says watchdog - Times Online
Thousands of patients are feared to be dying needlessly every year because of poor communication between hospital staff, faulty equipment and a lack of skills.
An analysis of errors has found that some staff failed to make basic checks and that others did not see that their patient’s condition was quickly deteriorating, with fatal results.
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Every year about 13 million people are admitted to acute hospitals in England and Wales. Estimates of the number of deaths due to medical errors vary between 800 and 34,000 a year, but the true scale is unknown because NHS staff are often reluctant to report mistakes and close calls.
The agency said that 1,804 serious incidents were reported as resulting in death in 2005, with 576 of these cases being avoidable.
As Camilla Cavendish says:
Hospitals must be taken to the cleaners -Times Online
In the week that Bournemouth council banned the issuing of armbands at its swimming pools, for fear of spreading germs, we are told that 60,000 hospital patients this year will catch the superbug Clostridium difficile. While one part of the public sector is infected with a virulent strain of health and safety disease (let’s call it HSD), another – the part that is supposed to look after our health – seems strangely immune.....Cases of “C diff”, as it is known in the trade, have risen by 22 per cent in the past year, affecting more than 15,500 people over 65. It is not always lethal: in 2005 it was mentioned on 3,697 English death certificates (MRSA was mentioned on 1,512). But those figures understate the problem, because hospital-acquired infections often go unmentioned as a factor in death. The campaign group MRSA Action UK believes that many deaths that are listed as organ failure will also have involved MRSA.
It is generally agreed that the UK’s performance in combating these bugs lags behind every other European country except – oh, here’s a comfort – Romania....It is trickier to isolate patients in the NHS because it has far fewer empty beds than almost any other Western health service. That is a direct consequence of the determined reduction in hospital beds from almost 300,000 20 years ago to 175,000 last year. At Stoke Mandeville, where at least 33 and possibly 65 people died from C. difficile in 2004, staff claimed that they could not isolate patients because of budgets and waiting-time targets.
The fact is that a clean hospital is a well-managed hospital. Infection control is not impossible. What it really boils down to, in the words of Georgina Duckworth, of the Health Protection Agency, is “running a tight ship”. Only a well-managed hospital will get a grip on superbugs. And the fact is that there are still far too many poorly managed hospitals. The superbugs are not only a problem in themselves – they are also a symptom of what is wrong with the NHS culture.
When voters said that they wanted to bring back matron, they did not mean “appoint someone with the title of matron and ask her to build partnerships with team members towards a better future”, which is pretty much what happened in 2001. They wanted someone with the authority and willingness to tell others what to do.
The Healthcare Commission report published this week contains some telling quotes from NHS employees. “It’s difficult to enforce authority like it was in the past,” says one. “Staff have so many rights, unions, human resources,” says another. And the report concludes that “overly authoritarian or hierarchical styles of management” can now be perceived as “bullying”.
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Outside the NHS, health and safety is being enforced maniacally. There is no shortage of bossy enforcers to remove your rubber ring. I never thought I’d say it, but we need a bit more of that in the NHS.
