Crosswords3 mins ago
Funding For Nhs
Wes Streeting has announced that in order that the NHS to get more money, they must have reforms, and those failing will not receive any pay increase.
Pity the Government did'nt have the same policy when they awarded railworkers a 22% increase without any reforms what so ever.
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Trail Unions wanted paying back so Sir 2TK and Robber dreamt up the 22Bn (or whatever figure they have this week) to clober the tax payer and give them cash to buy them off.
The NHS workers are not so lucky although Wes is correct in his approach. To be fair to the man he has been saying this for a long time but I do wonder how long it will be before he is silenced
"I think they will ensure the record reads "success" whether it's true or not."
And I think you are almost certainly correct, dave. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have to deal with the NHS you will quickly discover that its staff have some very strange ideas when it comes to targets.
A few years ago I was unfortunate to have to visit A&E. My GP suspected I might be suffering from a pulmonary embolism and sent me directly to A&E in a taxi (paid for by me, but I was quite happy with that rather than ponce about waiting for an ambulance).
Despite the fact that she had contacted the hospital for me to be seen in a “walk in“ emergency clinic, that clinic had packed up for the weekend (it was about 4:15pm on Friday) so round to A&E I was sent. Nothing much happened until about 8:30 when a senior- looking nurse called me to her desk:
“I have to check you in”
“But I checked in four hours ago”
“Yes. I have to do it again”
“Why”
“Because you’ve been here for almost four hours. If we leave you any longer you will have missed our target”.
“Er no. You will. I’ve been here all the time waiting for attention. I've been carefully listening for my name to be called and I haven't missed anything. What happens to your record of my first attendance?”
“It gets closed”
“So that’s a success on your records despite the fact I haven’t been seen by anybody?”
“Yes”
“Doesn’t anyone notice that loads of patients are checking in twice about four hours apart”
“I couldn’t say. Nobody’s ever mentioned it to me.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that it might be better if you did show you couldn’t cope with demand? Then you might get more resources.”
“No. We're only allowed to have so many “missed targets” each month. Now I need..."
“Well I’ll have to be one of them. I don't care what you need - I am not co-operating with this farce.”
I returned to my seat (well, to another seat actually because a drunk had taken mine and had vomited on the floor) and was eventually seen at about 11pm. Following a scan where I had dye injected into me (which is a complete story in itself) it was declared that I didn’t have a PE and could go home as soon as the doctor had seen me. At around 2:30am, after a number of representations to try to get a doctor to give me the OK, and somebody to take the canula out of my forearm, I called a taxi and went home with it still attached. Mrs NJ and I had to carefully extract it after having a cup of tea. It was about 4am when we finally go to bed.
I never did find out what was wrong with me, but I did find out quite a bit about NHS “targets”.
NJs experience is nothing new if In Stitches by Dr Nick Edwards is anything to go by.
He was (may still be for all I know) an A&E Dr, and in the book he talks of if a patient hadn't been seen after (from memory) 4 hours after an initial triage, they'd be palmed off somewhere else, sometimes a ward, so the figures could be manipulated that the 4 hour target had been met.
The book was written in the midst of the Blair years.
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