The envy of the world?

"The NHS is the envy of the world",  so the campaigners tell us when changes to the NHS are discussed; "the envy of the world". Total crap of course; if it was the envy of the world then surely other countries would be queueing up to copy its features. Instead of which they have a selection of other systems that vary quite widely from the NHS's free state provision model.

Two articles about the NHS that appeared on the same page of Sunday's Telegraph really spoke to me. The first told a horrible story of NHS ineptitude and neglect, here's a brief extract from a harrowing tale:

'When Adam Rodin took his 93-year-old father Sam to hospital for breathing difficulties, he was confident that he was in the right hands.

Not only had Mr Rodin had always had good health, the family were confident they could navigate the NHS: Adam is a a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Barnet Hospital, his wife Bridget is a retired nurse, and his twin brother Andrew is a consultant physician.

But Mr Rodin died five weeks after being admitted with breathing difficulties to a large teaching hospital in
London.

This weekend his son came forward - despite working in the NHS - to accuse those who were supposed to care for his father of a string of failings.

Mr Rodin jnr said that his father was not fed properly, losing a third of his body weight in hospital, that he was shunted between 15 wards in six weeks, that there was a lack of communication among staff, and finally, that a nurse berated his family for giving the 93 year-old water within his earshot.'

The second story is even more harrowing and disgusting and involves the use of 'DNR' orders. This Telegraph article reports the findings of spot checks of 100 hospitals undertaken by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), an official watchdog, earlier this year.

'A charity for the elderly said the disclosures were evidence of "euthanasia by the backdoor," with potentially-lethal notices being placed on the files of patients simply because they were old and frail.'

There are plenty iof examples, here are just a few:

'* Inspectors who visited Queen Elizabeth Hospital, run by University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation trust, found no evidence that any of the patients whose files were marked DNR had been informed about the decision, nor their relatives told. The hospital's own audit showed that in one ward, 30 per cent of cases did not involve any such conversations.

* At University Hospitals Bristol Foundation trust, there was no evidence that a DNR order placed on a patient had been discussed with the person or next of kin. A junior doctor told inspectors that they did "not tend to discuss" such decisions with families.

* At Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, run by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital trust, a patient was labelled as DNR based on old medical notes from a previous admission – despite the fact their health had improved.

* Asked how decisions to make such orders were made, staff at Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation trust gave an example of an elderly person on the ward with health problems judged to make "resuscitation less appropriate". The doctor involved did not know if the patient or an advocate had been asked for an opinion, or told that the notice had been imposed.'

This Do Not Resuscitate policy comes very close to state sponsored secret euthanasia and should not happen in a modern, caring, patient-centred health service. The NHS seems to be increasingly run for its staff's benefit not for its patients. The last set of findings released late last week showed that one in five NHS hospitals were actually breaking the law and that in 20 hospitals nursing care was so poor that it breached the Health and Social Care Act 2008. If the law was broken, who has been prosecuted? Nurses have tortured elderly patients by depriving them of water, administrators have been complicit in this torture by requiring form-filling to take priority over patient care, and so on.

When I was in my teens and early 20s I knew quite a few nurses (SRN and SEN) and the care they showed for patients and their adherence to rules of hygiene were laudable. Now nursing has become a degree entry career, the nurses are deemed to be above emptying bed pans or giving care and attention to sick patients. Instead these roles are carried out by often unqualified auxiliaries whilst the nurses sit behind desks on the ward and elsewhere and ensure that all necessary boxes are ticked. The death of a patient requires just another tick, caring for a patient means getting up and talking to & reassuring a scared old lady or gentleman.


The NHS needs improvement and modernisation if it it is ever to be the envy of the world. Will the Conservative party be allowed to carry out such improvements by the chattering classes for whom an NHS that mistreats and often no longer really cares properly for patients is still 'the envy of the world'?

The NHS is the envy of the world

'The NHS is the envy of the world' we are told by those who cannot come to terms with the reality of the NHS for many, many people. I don't think that rest of the world envy us a national health service where it is reported that Doctors are prescribing drinking water for neglected elderly patients to stop them dying of thirst in hospital. It seems that some doctors have discovered that prescribing water is the only way to ensure that NHS nurses give water to their patients.

The Mail reports that:

'Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Another 300 die malnourished. The latest report – by the Care Quality Commission – found patients frequently complained they were spoken to in a ‘condescending and dismissive’ manner.

The watchdog said three of 12 NHS trusts visited in the past three months were failing to meet the most basic standards required by law.

They were: Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust and Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust in North London.

The findings follow a joint campaign by the Mail and the Patients Association last year which exposed shocking examples of substandard care.

Similar failings were highlighted earlier this year by the Health Service Ombudsman who cited cases of patients left to become so thirsty they could not cry for help.

Since February, a team of inspectors from the CQC – including a nurse and an elderly patient – have been visiting 100 NHS trusts unannounced to check elderly patients are treated with dignity.

They found other, less serious concerns at a further three trusts: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Homerton University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in London and the Wye Valley NHS Trust – meaning just half of hospitals were providing the most basic standards of care.'

The NHS 'the envy of the world'? I think not.

The NHS - "the envy of the world"

It is a truism, much loved by the Labour party and the BBC, that the NHS is "the envy of the world" and so anyone that is less than passionate about the NHS must have their credibility destroyed. So it is with much glee that the BBC report the attacks on Daniel Hannan for speaking out in America. The BBC and the Labour party, and there is a definite alliance between the two on this matter as with many others, have been itching to "get back" Daniel Hannan ever since he made that speech and elicited such a revealing response from Gordon Brown. This is their first opportunity and they have taken it with both hands. Andy Burnham has accused Dan Hannan of being almost "unpatriotic" and tried to raise fears about the NHS in Tory hands with this

"What has happened within the last 48 hours is what Cameron has feared most because it lays bare the Tories' deep ambivalence towards the NHS."

The Labour party love to call Conservatives unpatriotic when they disagree with Labour policy, remember the similar Labour slurs when George Osborne said that Labour Government policies could trigger a run on the pound?

The "envy of the world" is of course nothing of the sort. If it was then other countries would have copied the NHS, but which have?

If you have had the misfortune to spend any time in a NHS hospital then you would know all about the dirt, the uncaring nurses and the overwhelming sense that the hospital would run so much better if it wasn't for the pesky patients. The "deep clean" was Labour spin. A October 2007 EU wide survey ranked Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction.

As I wrote in 2007: A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.


But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free? True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, but you can't so - a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.


If the NHS was indeed "the envy of the world" then not only would much of the rest of the world have copied it but there would be little demand for expensive private medical insurance. That few (if any countries) have copied it and that there is great demand for private medical insurance speaks volumes.

The BBC and which stories it covers and which it chooses not to

The BBC has recently been pushing hard to portray private nursing homes as dangerous and not worthy of comparison with the NHS which is the 'envy of the world'. Here's a story from the NHS that I doubt the BBC will cover:

'The ultimate NHS indignity: Body of hospital patient left to die in corridor is ignored for hours... before staff simply drag him away'

'Envy of the world', I don't think so.

If the NHS is the envy of the world then why do so few countries follow the same health care model. If I could choose where I fell ill, I would choose France, Spain or Italy before the UK. These are all countries where the hospitals are clean and well run, the doctors and nurses polite & efficient and where you feel that you, the patient, are the priority rather than it being meeting the latest target or fitting in with the health-workers schedule.

The NHS is the "envy of the world"

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair before him as well as assorted Labour Ministers are fond of telling us that the NHS is the "envy of the world". The news about the Staffordshire General Hospital, and others, puts the lie to the claims. Let's look at some of the things that other Countries should apparently be envious of:

"Dehydrated patients were forced to drink out of flower vases, while others were left in soiled linen on filthy wards.

Receptionists carrying out initial checks on patients;

Two clinical decision units - one unstaffed - used as 'dumping grounds' for A&E patients to avoid missing waiting targets;

Nurses who turned off heart monitors because they didn't understand how to use them;

Delayed operations, with some patients having surgery cancelled four days in a row and left without food, drink or medication;

"My wife had treatment at this hospital and it was beyond belief. Staff tried to get my wife to believe she had already been given her tablets when they hadn't; later admitting they ran out and did not want to call out the Pharmacy! People were screaming for the toilet as their requests for assistance went unheeded."
Mick, Stafford

"My mother in law died at a hospital where her 'care' was almost non-existant. She died screaming in pain because nobody could be found to replace her morphine pump." Claire, Norfolk

"When my father was in hospital for months, he lay in a bed with dirty, torn blankets and grubby sheets. I asked to see the Hospital Manager and was walked through the most plush of offices. I was sickened and told her so." Sammy, UK

"My sister recently qualified as a nurse. During her training a fellow student commented to a manager that a doctor hadn't bothered to change his scrubs after undertaking a minor operation on a patient and wore the same ones for his next operation. She was warned any whistle blowing of that sort would result in her being kicked out." Jo, Middlesex"

"Envy of the world" my arse, the NHS is an over bureaucratic organisation run by bureaucrats for bureaucrats, it exists to ration care and meet government targets. My visits to NHS hospitals have left me usually feeling unclean and often untreated as well. If the NHS was half as good as Gordon Blair claims then many people would not spend the horrendous sums that they do on private medial care.

Who are the BMA and why are they opposed to the NHS reforms. Why are the BBC so supportive of them both?

All day the BBC have had representatives of the BMA on the radio, television and quoted on the web news explaining why the government's reform of the NHS is a bad idea and that hospitals will have to close, patient care will be compromised and treatment rationed by this risky restructuring.

So who are the BMA? Are they impartial observers whose only interest is the welfare of the NHS? Of course not, the BMA are part of the TUC of the NHS. There prime interest in this matter is to protect the interests of their members. When I say 'interests' I mean of course income, for the government's proposals may, if they work and are allowed to work, end the many 'Spanish practices' in the NHS, the over-generous overtime and replace them with a degree of competition.


The BBC sees itself as the protector of socialised medicine in the UK and will not accept any criticisms of the hard-working staff in the NHS. This morning 5Live were obsessed by the idea that David Cameron had let slip that he thought the NHS was (in some regards) second-rate; I think he was just talking about the UK's cancer survival rate. This comment was just not acceptable to the BBC; why? My interactions with the NHS have generally shown it to be second-rate at best. I have experienced incorrect diagnoses, had injuries inflicted upon me (and indeed Mrs NotaSheep) as a result of doctors' carelessness, spent hours in A&E waiting to see a doctor and watching the inefficiency that surrounded us, spent a night in an A&E ward kept awake by chatting nurses at the nurses station, watched my blood being smeared across the tunic of a nurse after she gave me an injection and then watched her wander off to the next patient... The NHS is not 'the envy of the world' and I blogged examples previously.

Here's something I wrote  in August 2009:

'The "envy of the world" is of course nothing of the sort. If it was then other countries would have copied the NHS, but which have?

If you have had the misfortune to spend any time in a NHS hospital then you would know all about the dirt, the uncaring nurses and the overwhelming sense that the hospital would run so much better if it wasn't for the pesky patients. The "deep clean" was Labour spin. A October 2007 EU wide survey ranked Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction.

As I wrote in 2007:

'A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.


But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free? True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, but you can't so - a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.


If the NHS was indeed "the envy of the world" then not only would much of the rest of the world have copied it but there would be little demand for expensive private medical insurance. That few (if any countries) have copied it and that there is great demand for private medical insurance speaks volumes. '

'The envy of the world'

Two articles from a while back that make you wonder how those people who claim the NHS is 'the envy of the world' can sleep at night.

The first is from early July and reports:

'A young patient who died of dehydration at a leading teaching hospital phoned police from his bed because he was so thirsty, an inquest heard yesterday. Officers arrived at Kane Gorny's bedside, but were told by nurses that he was in a confused state and were sent away. The keen footballer and runner, 22, died of dehydration a few hours later. ... Yesterday an inquest was told how Mr Gorny died after blunders and neglect by 'lazy and careless' medical staff at St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London. His mother Rita Cronin, a civil servant told Westminster Coroner's Court that staff tutted at her and repeatedly refused to listen to her concerns that her son hadn't been given vital medication. ... At one point he became so desperate and upset that staff sedated and restrained him – and on the night before his death, his mother said, he was not checked on by medical staff, despite being in a room on his own. Following his death, a nurse allegedly inquired whether the family, from Balham, South-West London, was 'finished' and asked a matron in front of them whether she could 'bag him up'. ... Miss Cronin said she sat in his room for three hours the night before he died without a single nurse checking on him or giving him vital medicine. She said she told a nurse who walked past the room that Mr Gorny had not had his medication. When Miss Cronin volunteered to return to the hospital should he wake, another nurse allegedly told her: 'You don't need to do that. If he makes noise, I'll close the door and then he won't wake everyone up.' She added: 'I later realised that her comment was unbelievable but I was so distraught that it didn't register.' The morning of her son's death, May 28, 2009, Miss Cronin arrived at the hospital early to find him delirious with swollen lips and a swollen tongue. She recalled: 'I then heard three nurses outside his room and I said: "There's something wrong with my son. He doesn't look right." 'The nurse said to me "He had a good night. There's nothing wrong with him and he's just had breakfast and a chat with us." 'I thought: "How could he have had breakfast? There's no evidence (of breakfast)." 'The nurse carried on her handover then I interrupted again and said: “He's not right.” 'The other nurse then tutted and said: "She's already told you he had a good night." And with that the three of them walked off.' Miss Cronin said she then noticed that her son hadn't been given his medication because the packet was still on the table by his bed. She told the locum doctor about her concerns, but the doctor said it wouldn't do him any harm. A doctor doing the rounds then checked on Mr Gorny. Miss Cronin said: 'He took one look at him then he started calling to everyone “Get in there quickly”. 'It suddenly dawned on me he hasn't had his medication, hasn't had his bloods done, nobody's given him a drink, nobody's bothered to put his drip back on him. 'Nobody's done anything since yesterday afternoon when he became aggressive.' She said there was a 'flurry of activity' and everyone 'had a very sad look on their face' as they battled to save her son's life. Miss Cronin said: 'The main doctor came out and you could tell he was really angry. He said: “You need to go and see your son. He's dying.” The couple then found their son lying in blood and fluid-soaked sheets and a nurse came in and asked them to help her to change them. The same nurse later came into the matron's office and asked whether they were 'finished', adding: 'Can I bag him up?' The death certificate said Mr Gorny died of a 'water deficit' and 'hypernatraemia' – a medical term for dehydration.'

In case you think that NHS staff that neglect patients to that sort of degree would get adequately punished, you should read this Mail article which reported that:

'Rogue nurses who have been found guilty of threatening or abusing patients, stealing from them or being drunk on duty are being allowed to continue working, a Daily Mail investigation has revealed. The nursing profession's official regulator, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is repeatedly letting nurses go back to work despite being found guilty of a catalogue of offences, including just being dangerously incompetent. Today, the regulator’s overseer, the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, has released a hard-hitting report demanding fundamental changes in the way the NMC is run after concluding that patients are being let down because of 'failings at every level'. As a Daily Mail investigation reveals, this is not before time. For not only has the body failed in important cases to protect vulnerable patients from rogue staff, it has run its administration system so badly that, even when such nurses have been disciplined, the sanctions against them did not go on their professional records for employers to see. This occurred in at least 500 cases, of which around 100 were ‘of major concern’. ... Meanwhile, the nurses’ regulator, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, has seemed concerned less with protecting patients from harm than with saving the careers of nurses who have seriously transgressed the laws of their profession and the basic tenets of human decency. The body is responsible for the regulation of the 670,000 nurses and midwives currently registered in the UK. Last month, for example, a nurse who was sacked for hitting a patient and charged with common assault by the police was allowed by the NMC to remain working. The council’s disciplinary panel heard how Maureen Yoliswa Booi, a Registered Mental Nurse, struck a resident in her care at an NHS-run unit. The incident was witnessed by a colleague, the hearing was told. Ms Booi was dismissed by her employer and has since been charged with common assault. But instead of being struck off, she was placed under a ‘conditions of practice order’ for 18 months, which stipulates that Ms Booi must not, at any time, be the sole registered nurse on duty, and that she must tell the Nursing and Midwifery Council of the outcome of her pending prosecution for assault. This means she is free to apply for a job with any employer, though the NMC requires that she tell them that there is an ‘order’ on her record. This is perturbing enough as an isolated judgment, but it has remarkable similarities to another case heard last month, of Loveness Makombe, a registered nurse working at the Bupa-run St Christopher’s Care Home in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. The NMC panel found her guilty of ‘shouting aggressively’ at a confused elderly patient, as well as verbally threatening the woman, who had dementia, and dragging her out of a room ‘in a manner that caused her to become distressed’. Rather than cracking down on this abuse, which bears disturbing similarities with the sort of intimidation exposed at Winterbourne View, the disciplinary panel said it ‘does not believe there is an under-lying attitudinal or behavioural problem with the nurse’. The sanction it handed down amounted to a regulatory slap on the risk — it placed only a ‘caution’ on her record for a three-year period.'

Ah the NHS, 'envy of the world' you know!

The NHS is the envy of the world

A panelist on "Any Questions" or "Question Time" only has to utter the phrase "the NHS is the envy of the world" for there to be a smattering of self-satisfied applause from some of the audience, add some comment about the dedicated workers in the NHS and it makes intelligent criticism all but impossible.

Frank Dobson promised to make the NHS the envy of the world in 1997, "When the Health Secretary Frank Dobson unveiled the government's Health White Paper for England in December 1997, he called it a new beginning for the NHS. He said his aim was to promote fairness and efficiency while eliminating waste and unnecessary bureaucracy. The Paper announced a reduction in the number of NHS trusts and health authorities and a limitation on the role played by the internal market system introduced by the Conservatives in 1990. In total, Mr Dobson claimed the changes would save £1bn by cutting unnecessary red tape." Have you noticed the reduction in red tape and bureaucracy? One of the new services promised was "The NHS is to get its own information superhighway. It will be called 'NHSNet' and allow on-line booking of out-patient appointments and speed up test results. The government wants demonstration sites up and running in 1998." Remind me when that came on-line... You can read more about Frank Dobson's plans here.

In October 2007 a survey across all EU member states plus Switzerland and Norway ranks Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction. You can read more about this survey here. Here are some key points - "Its rating was dragged down by waiting lists, MRSA infection rates, access to cancer drugs and dentists as well as cancer survival rates." "The Euro Health Consumer Index, which has been compiled for the past three years by the Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish think-tank, is the only survey that compares European health care systems from a consumer point of view. It assessed 27 indicators in five categories: patients' rights and information; waiting time for treatment; outcomes measured by certain death rates; the range of services offered by health systems; and the availability of drugs. In five categories, the UK scores just 581 points out of 1,000 compared to top place Austria's average of 806. This puts Britain behind Estonia and just above Italy and Portugal." "the report concludes: "Despite substantial funding increases, the UK is still a mediocre overall performer."

Gordon Brown and his Labour apparatchiks still believe that throwing large sums of money at a problem will solve it, especially if you pay most of that money to Consultants who can use long words and produce pretty charts. However a recent study in The Lancet said survival rates in Britain were among the lowest in Europe.
"Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists. ."

"A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

"Well would you want to be ill in America" is the cry when anyone suggests that maybe some form of payment for health care might be called for. Well it appears that "Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.

But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free. True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, see note at end of this article -, but you do risk contracting MRSA, Clostridium difficile etc. Maybe that is why "Record numbers go abroad for health".
"Thousands of "health tourists" are going as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations – such is their despair over the quality of health services. The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration with NHS waiting lists are fuelling the increasing trend. More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade. Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away." What's the most popular country to go to for surgery? India. Why? "Almost all of those who had received treatment abroad said they would do the same again, with patients pointing out that some hospitals in India had screening policies for the superbug MRSA that have yet to be introduced in this country." You might have an 8 hour flight to Delhi or Bombay but once there the hospitals are actually cleaned properly every day, not as part of a special "deep clean". For more on the "deep clean" idea, you can read Dr Rant and Devils Kitchen. The point being that it isn't the building that is harbouring MRSA, it is the staff, patients and visitors who carry it. Roy Lilley, a former NHS trust chairman and the author of a book on healthcare management, told the BBC he thought the "deep cleaning" idea was "irritatingly populist". He said: "This will get a huge round of applause from the Labour Party conference floor and everyone will say 'yes, he's the man that's cleaning up the hospitals'. "But at the end of the day, the infection control systems are about handwashing; it's about clinical discipline and it's about screening people before they come in. "You can clean a hospital on Monday and on Wednesday, you'll be back where you started." ... " That was from Democratic Deficit.


For more on NHS stupidity take a look at the NHS Blog Doctor, Health Matters and Right for Scotland.


The NHS is free at the point of use. Yes it generally is but a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.

'The envy of the world'?

Yes it's the NHS again, that unchallengeable totem of British politics. The Telegraph reports the appalling case of

"A hospital patient, Kane Gorny, died of dehydration after becoming so desperate for a drink of water that he called police for help. "

It seems that this patient was not given his vital post-operation medication by the staff at St George's Hospital in Tooting, south London. Mr Gorny

"became very dehydrated but his requests for water were refused and nurses called in security guards to restrain him when he became angry.

He became so frustrated that he rang the police from his bed to demand their help but officers were assured Mr Gorny was fine.

She said nurses assumed he was just badly behaved."

That's bad enough but the fact that "Mr Gorny’s cause of death was determined to be dehydration." is beyond belief. I wonder if the police investigation will be able to find a culprit and what the hospital is doing to find the person or persons who killed Kane Gorny in a slow and painful manner.

Meanwhile the defence is the usual pathetic corporate management speak:

"A spokesman for St George's Hospital said: “We are extremely sorry about the death of Kane Gorny and understand the distress that this has caused to his family."

Understand the distress? Their relative died because staff at your hospital allegedly failed to keep him hydrated and medicated. Their relative
allegedly died because your staff thought that he was being badly behaved because he kept asking for a drink.

"“A full investigation was carried out and new procedures introduced to ensure that such a case cannot happen in future."

Did the 'full investigation' allocate blame or is the hospital a blame free zone?

"“We have written to the family to explain the actions that have been taken and to answer their concerns about Mr Gorny's care."

Really and did you explain how a large hospital does not have the procedures in place to ensure that a patient does not doe of dehydration? If Mr Gorny had been a quiet patient who died quietly without making a fuss I could almost understand how his plight was missed but he even called the police, surely someone should have taken a look at his file to see what was amiss.


Now I know whay O have private medical insurance; the only times I have been to an NHS hospital I have been disgusted at the lack of cleanliness, the dreadful way patients are treated by the doctors and nurses and the way that non-medical staff act as though they are doing patients a favour by even speaking to them.

The NHS the 'envy of the world'? I think not.

The envy of the world?

The NHS is the envy of the world? Really? The Mail reports that:

"Surgeons from Sweden, Denmark and Finland were flown into Britain between 2003 and 2006 as part of a £3million scheme to speed up hip and knee replacements.

But concerns were raised about the quality of the work carried out and many patients fear the surgeons were insufficiently trained or skilled.

More than one third of people operated on at Weston-super-Mare General Hospital (WGH), Somerset, had an unsatisfactory result and six legal cases are now being considered."

Read the rest of the story.

The NHS - "Envy of the World" (yes again)

The Scotsman reports that:

"SURGEONS left behind more than 300 instruments and pieces of equipment in patients' bodies in Scottish hospitals over the past five years.
Since 2004, at least 280 patients had to be re-admitted to hospitals to have "foreign objects" extracted from them, figures released by the Scottish Government have revealed."

"The envy of the world"...

The politics of envy

The BBC are pleased to report that:

"Vince Cable is to call for highly paid executives in the private and public sectors to be named and shamed.

The Lib Dem Deputy leader's speech to the party's spring conference will demand the disclosure of all salaries more than £194,000 - what the PM earns.

Publicly listed firms publish board members' pay but Mr Cable will claim some of the highest earners do not join boards to avoid full disclosure.

Mr Cable is expected to name two of them in his speech."

The socialist BBC and their fellow travellers love to indulge in a bit of the politics of envy, don't they?

The envy of the world?

Two more examples that show why the NHS is the "envy of the world".

The Mail reports the case of the

"Mother-of-three (who) died in pub as solo woman paramedic 'stood outside and refused to help'".

The Mail also reports the case of

"an injured shopper (who) was left lying in the road for three hours in pouring rain waiting for an ambulance.

The woman, 53, was knocked unconscious after falling out of a taxi and when she came round she complained she could not move her neck.

An ambulance was called at 6pm, but the woman was forced to wait until 9pm for a police officer trained in first aid to arrive, assess her and take her to hospital in a police van."

The NHS, you can see why the whole world envies us it...

The NHS "The envy of the world"?

Maybe not:

"Man collapses with ruptured appendix... three weeks after NHS doctors 'took it out'"

Yes that's right... do read the whole story and glory in the NHS - "the envy of the world".

The NHS is the envy of the world

Myself and Mrs NotaSheep have recently spent more time in hospitals, both private and NHS, than we would have liked to have done and one thing has been abundantly clear - the NHS is nothing to be envious of. The comparison between the facilities, the staff, the cleanliness (I could go on) at NHS hospitals and Private hospitals does not reflect well on the NHS. Every NHS hospital we have visited has been dirty, the staff disinterested, unhelpful and untidy, the waits interminable; whilst the Private hospitals have been all but spotlessly clean, the staff efficient, helpful and smartly dressed and of course the waiting has been inconsequential.

If the NHS is "the envy of the world" as we used to be often told by this Labour government, then why have no other major industrialised countries copied it?


The Tangled Web has a good article on the NHS today, do read the whole thing but here are four of the points David Vance makes that I think bear repeating:

"1. According to the NHS, 35,000 people die each year "un-necessarily" in NHS hospitals. The death toll in Iraq in 2006 was 35,000 - according to the UN.

Does any other major industrialised country have such a high hospital unnecessary death rate?

2. 6500 people die each year from hospital-acquired infections in the UK. The average figure for northern Europe is 100.

65 times the death rate of the northern Europe average, is that something to be proud of? Maybe this is something that Gordon Brown and his team of incompetents could be questioned about?

3. Since Labour came to power, overall numbers of NHS staff has risen by 20%. The number of managers, however, has increased by 100%, from 20,000 to 40,000. At the same time, the number of hospital beds has fallen from 250,000 to 180,00. In 2007, the NHS confederation argued there should be 195,000 managers - more than one per bed.

The next time Gordon Brown or one of his fellow idiots tries to claim during an interview that all is wonderful in the NHS and if it isn't, at least "we" have "invested" so much money in the NHS, perhaps these figures could be raised and the point pressed home.

4. In 2003, the NHS launched a new IT system which would cost £2.3 billion. This was revised in subsequent years to £6 billion. Then to £9 billion. Finally it has been moved up to £12.4 billion The time scale for completion has moved from 2 to 10 years, but with no guarantee this will happen."

This is one of the biggest scandals of this Labour government, the money spent for so little return is criminal. This Labour government has time after time fallen prey to sharp suited, fast talking IT consultancy companies and their lack of expertise in specifying what they require from a system has been found out time after time. I believe that Gordon Brown should be held personally responsible for the money wasted on each major IT system and PFI scheme and I would be happy to see him work to pay part of the debt off by cleaning the toilets in a gastroenterology ward for the rest of his natural life. Unfortunately, instead of this, he will retire on his huge publicly funded pension, be paid handsomely to write his self-serving memoirs and live comfortably for years - isn't that a depressing thought?

The NHS - the envy of the world (part 2)

Back in September 2007 I blogged about an experience I had just had in a NHS hospital. I reproduce that article now, somehow I think I would have fared better in the US:

"Mr NotaSheep found himself in hospital very recently with a severe allergic reaction. Once pumped full of antihistamines and pain killers what I really wanted to do was to sleep, but sleep on a NHS Acute Observation Ward is not easy to come by. One patient talked to himself all night; "Ow, ow, I wanna go home, go home, I wanna go home" for six hours, he was not a well man but the nurses did nothing, surely a side room could have been found for him. Then there were the nurses who chatted all night about this and that, only occasionally looking in on a patient who needed treatment, I was visited not at all that night, it was Mrs NotaSheep who gave me water and a few bites of an apple. To make sleep harder to come by, the ward lights were left on all night in the male ward (although they were off in the next door female ward - same nurses' station). In the morning after some of the nurses had discussed career paths, spoken to their various family members about the day ahead and chatted to the cleaners, Mr non-stop talk was moved to a proper ward and the lights were turned off, leaving the ward in semi darkness for half an hour before the sun came flooding in. I would have thought that sleep was a good medicine, if so I was denied it during my stay. The staff were generally friendly and competent and out of the half a dozen or so nurses and two doctors I saw, at least one spoke English like a native. The instructions from the East European Doctor re tablet taking were no helped by his inability to cope with English tenses, which made our conversation over when I should take tablets as opposed to when I had taken tablets, slightly surreal. "

Envy of the world? I think not.

'The envy of the world' (part xx)

The Independent report

'A man was left infertile after surgeons botched an operation on his testicle.

Doctors at the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds were tasked with removing the man's right epididymis - a coiled tube which carries sperm away from the testicles - but they removed the left one instead. '

Yes the NHS truly is 'the envy of the world'. I believe the expression that comes to mind is - they dropped a bollock there; I'm sorry...

NHS "investment"

I see that even the New Labour sometime house newspaper "The Sun" has worked out that Gordon Brown's "investment" in the NHS has largely been a waste of money.

"THE extra £43billion spent on the NHS has failed to make it world class, ministers were told last night.

At least HALF of the cash lavished on the NHS since 2002 has gone on wages and extra staff with no obvious improvement, a report claimed."

Well at least they will learn from their mistakes, right?

WRONG


"But it said that taxpayers should stump up even MORE money for the health service."

Why not, it's only taxpayers money - it's not as though they have to work for it.

"In 2002, Mr Brown lifted National Insurance by 1p on all wage packets in a bid to make the NHS the envy of the world. But with no increase in productivity reported, much of the money has gone to waste."

The envy of the world! The jewel in the crown" New Labour always make it seem as though the whole world envies our NHS. The NHS came 17th out of 29 European countries in a poll this year. The Euro Health Consumer Index, which has been compiled for the past three years by the Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish think-tank, is the only survey that compares European health care systems from a consumer point of view. It assessed 27 indicators in five categories: patients' rights and information; waiting time for treatment; outcomes measured by certain death rates; the range of services offered by health systems; and the availability of drugs. In five categories, the UK scores just 581 points out of 1,000 compared to top place Austria's average of 806. This puts Britain behind Estonia and just above Italy and Portugal. Thanks to the Telegraph for that report, you can read more here. The Telegraph report continues "Britain did receive plaudits for patient access to information through NHS Direct, the existence of a patient's ombudsman and hospital league tables. However, the report concludes: "Despite substantial funding increases, the UK is still a mediocre overall performer.""


Do you want to be even more depressed? Read this from the same Telegraph article

"A recent study in The Lancet said survival rates in Britain were among the lowest in Europe.

Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists.

A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates.

Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount.

The money "invested" in the NHS has largely been wasted, this government's management of the NHS, like its management of education, the economy, agriculture and so on, and so on, has been below poor. Finally the public are realising that there is an alternative, not a very radical one as yest, but there is an alternative and that realisation will only strengthen as the economy collapses under the sheer weight of Gordon Brown's mismanagement.


Take a look at George Pascoe-Watson's commenatry at the above Sun link, "good money after bad",

Aborted babies incinerated to heat UK hospitals - the NHS truly is 'the envy of the world'

'The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found. Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.”'

The NHS truly is 'the envy of the world' 

More here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10717566/Aborted-babies-incinerated-to-heat-UK-hospitals.html but not very likely on the BBC.

The NHS is 'the envy of the world' - Really?

Channel 4 News report

 'The 2004 figures show that NHS had the worst figures of all seven countries. Once the death rate was adjusted, England was 22 per cent higher than the average of all seven countries and it was 58 per cent higher than the best country.

That meant NHS patients were almost 60 per cent more likely to die in hospital compared with patients in the best country.

...

Of course, that was nearly 10 years ago and the NHS has been through several reforms and had record amounts of money poured into it until recently.

When Professor Jarman projected the figures forward to 2012, the hospital death rates in all seven countries had improved - England's faster than some. But it still had death rates 45 per cent higher than the leading country, which is America.

Because of confidentiality issues we are not allowed to name the other countries. But America stands out in the data for its lower mortality rates.'

Mmm the NHS truly is 'the envy of the world'