Government targets - yet another example of the "Law of unintended consequences"

This Labour government's love of targets has caused many problems in the areas of Education, Health, Law and Order and of course the Economy. Possibly Health has been the area of public life that has been the most screwed up by this target culture. The Guardian has details of the well known state of affairs that is the "Scandal of patients left for hours outside A&E". Put simply, this deeply inept Government pledged that all patients would be treated within four hours of admission. So what happens if a hospital fears it might miss this target and have patients waiting for more than four hours? They may already have all the staff working that they can and the staff can't work any longer because of the EU Working Time Directive. So what they do is simple, they don't admit the patients until they are sure they can be treated within four hours of admission. Yes they leave the patients sitting in ambulances outside the A&E department until they are pretty sure they can get them treated within four hours.

The Department of Health say it takes 15 minutes for an ambulance crew to deliver a patient to a hospital, clean the ambulance and re-stock if necessary and leave. Ambulance crews say it really only takes 5-10 minutes. So you may be shocked to discover that "In London, there were 14,700 occasions last year when an ambulance took at least an hour from its arrival at one of the capital's 35 hospitals to hand over a patient and be ready to respond to the next emergency. This figure includes 332 that took more than two hours." Figures from seven of England's eleven ambulance services for the last 15 months show that a total of at least 44,000 delays were reported.

Now apart from patients with broken limbs, breathing problems or having fits having to wait on an uncomfortable ambulance bed in an impromptu waiting room because some bureaucrats are scared of failing to meet a target set by another group of bureaucrats at the behest of a deeply flawed political ideology, there is the knock-on effect that if an ambulance is sitting outside A&E it can't be rushing to get to a person having a heart attack and saving their life. Oh well never mind, so long as targets are being met!