The NHS - 'envy of the world'

I know I have posted this sort of article before but the stories and statistics are depressingly regular. This time it's The Telegraph that reports:

'Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today. ... The Office for National Statistics figures also showed that: * as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals; * there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals; * 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates; * 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds. The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated . Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said the statistics were a grim and shaming reflection of 21st century Britain. "These are people's mothers, fathers, and grandparents," she said. "It is hard enough to lose a loved one, but to find out that they died because they were not adequately fed or hydrated, is a trauma no family should have to bear." Michelle Mitchell, Charity Director of Age UK, described the figures as "deeply distressing" given that such deaths were avoidable. '

The last time I spent a night on a NHS ward, I barely slept as the nurses chatted at the nurses station all night long. They didn't walk the ward, they didn't see if anyone was wide-wake (me) or in need of pain or comfort (the chap in the bed opposite me), they just chatted about boyfriends, clubs etc. Previous to that, at another NHS hospital, I had a drip put in by a nurse who spilt some blood as the drip went in... and wiped the blood off of her hand onto her apron and wandered off to the next patient. I was too weak to comment on the lapse in hygiene at the time. It seems to me that up until the late 1980s, nursing was seen as a caring profession for (mostly) girls whose educational levels were maybe not of the highest level but who wanted to care for people. They cared and they did their best for the patients, the matrons kept them up to the mark and the doctors provided the medical expertise. Hospitals were clean, run well and patients needs came first. This all changed and under Labour it changed vastly. Now nurses see themselves as health professionals, too grand to clean up a patient's vomit or excrement, there are nursing auxiliaries for those menial tasks. So patients see less of the nurses and more of all but untrained staff whose English is often poor and who are on very low wages. Nurses earn more and patients have worse care.