THE NHS KILLING FIELDS…
By David Vance On August 5th, 2012It’s the ENVY of the world.
“Basic errors by the medical staff in NHS hospitals are causing 12,000 deaths every year, reveals a deatiled study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The researchers found that with 13% of the patients, who died in NHS hospitals, something went wrong. 5.2%, equivalent to 11,859, of these deaths were caused by basic errors and could have been easily prevented.
Helen Hogan, the study leader explained, “We found medical staff were not doing the basics well enough – monitoring blood pressure and kidney function, for example. They were also not assessing patients holistically early enough in their admission so they didn’t miss any underlying condition. And they were not checking side-effects… before prescribing drugs.”
Repeat – ENVY of the world. (Copyright Chris Ryder)
I’d suspect that this information is true.
I’d also suspect that such problems exist in other large public and private sysyems.
How does the NHS compare with other systems, or how does the UK’s experience compare with that of other countries?
Why is this most basic of metrics always left out of NHS bashing reports like this?
Why is this most basic of metrics always left out of NHS bashing reports like this
Phantom
There is a fairly obvious political agenda at work. Report all bad news stories and ignore all good news stories. And hope to undermine public support for the NHS. It’s that simple, and its is continuing to fail, as it has since 1948.
“There is a fairly obvious political agenda at work. Report all bad news stories and ignore all good news stories. And hope to undermine public support for the NHS. It’s that simple, and its is continuing to fail, as it has since 1948.”
Spot on Peter. My mum had lifelong serious heart problems and had excellent top notch lifelong care from childhood courtesy of the NHS. It kept her alive until the age of 70 when she was predicted to die as a teenager. Stories like hers won’t be reported on ATW.
“There is a fairly obvious political agenda at work.”
Or maybe the NHS is a pretty shit way of rationing health care.
The idea that the BBC/Guardian front would cover up failures in the private sector is risible. On the contrary, if any private industry killed as many people as the NHS we’d never hear the end of it.
Or maybe the NHS is a pretty shit way of rationing health care.
Yes the private US system is so much better. It leaves 20% of adults with no health cover and as a result more than half of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills as a result of cancer diagnosis. Yeah, way to go for sure.
Pete
You approach this issue and all the others from a ideological, mind’s already made up perspective.
Forget about the cash bla bla bla.
How does the error rate or overall quality of care of the NHS compare with other systems? If we don’t know that, we don’t know very much now so we?
And in more private systems such as the US there is a different type of rationing, as those without means do without dental ( http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-04-24/health/fl-hk-dental-access-20110424_1_dental-care-private-dentist-medicaid-rolls )or medical care of any kind, esp in the South.
Peter -
The US system is not private. It’s a fascistic State/private arrangement, created for to benefit politicians and producers at the expense of consumers.
Bla bla bla
There is a robust private medical sector in the US, today.
Including doctors who don’t choose to see Medicaid or Medicare patients.
They choose not to deal with the low reimbursement rates and the paperwork.
Why do most discussions about the NHS quickly degenerate into a yah-boo ‘the American system is terrible’ name-calling, as if that were the only alternative.
Most of us want a National Health Service but not a Nationalised Health Service. One that cares about the patients more than the staff. One that acknowledges its mistakes and learns from them, not covers them up and silences the whistle-blowers. One that strives to be the best, not just to ensure that no-one gets better treatment than anyone else.
If we had that, it could indeed be the envy of the world.
The US has an atrocious child mortality rate compared to OECD countries generally whereas the NHS performs pretty well. IIRC Switzerland is one of the best, with private provision, but it is very heavily regulated.
The US also spends far more on medical care for far worse results overall.
To me, the NHS is like the BBC, if you had a clean sheet you’d never design it that way in a million years, but somehow the results are mostly very high quality anyway.
One of the reasons for the US problems is a lawsuit happy legal system, and the distortions caused by it.
The Swiss model is very interesting. It should have been studied more here.
Exactly. The French, Swiss and Dutch all have systems that are superior to both the UK and USA’s system.
The reason we need to be reminded that the NHS is a pretty poor health system is that it has to some extent become sacred- and therefore rational criticism of it results in extreme emotional reactions and makes it difficult to address its flaws.
The NHS is very much like the ‘Curates egg’ – good in parts!
It all very much depends on the folk you deal with, face to face. As in life, some are good, some are tolerable, and some are just plain nasty, all usually influenced to a degree by ‘the system’.
Dealing with individuals is easy, it’s dealing with mindless bureacracy that is the hard part. We, the patients, are just too small to be of much significance for such an arrogant, politically bigoted colossus as the NHS.
The US system unfortunately has to enter into any ATW discussions, since there are some here who actually believe it’s the best system evah, and it’s only problem is that the satanic Obama is about to harm it.
But…
I know a number of people who have experienced living under both the French / Swiss systems and the US system, when living in the various countries. None of them says that the US system is best. Regardless of whether they are American or European, you get a short laugh when you even ask the question.
Ross
Some of the NHS critics here would not reform, it, they would destroy it. Are other critics of the NHS those who would ” get the gummint out of health care ” types? Is that the reason why people defend the system so much, because they fear it would be replaced by something on the way to being nothing, the way the ATW critics might wish?