The Murderous Death Rate in the NHS
The recent uproar concerning the estimated 400, and possibly as high as 1200, patients who may have died needlessly as a result of ‘routine neglect’ by nursing staff after the management became preoccupied with cost-cutting and meeting government targets is by no means the first, nor the most serious, episode of ‘death by NHS’.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the tragic fate of the Thalidomide babies, of whom I have blogged before, and who this week, some 50 years later, are to be awarded a paltry extra £3.4 million; turning tactfully away from the deaths caused by the MRSA bacterium which alone is responsible for some 6,000 deaths over the past four years, I would like you to turn your attention for the moment, to the fate of the 4,670 people who were negligently given Hepatitis C – and in some cases HIV – by the box ticking, arse covering, target meeting, NHS.
Of 4,670 haemophiliacs, over 2,000 had died as a direct result of being given infected imported blood in what Lord Winston described as the ‘greatest tragedy in the history of the NHS’. Those who are calling for a public inquiry into Staffordshire might care to reflect on the ineffectual outcome of the inquiry which did result from that tragedy.
Both the bereaved families and those caring for survivors of the disaster had to fight long and hard for an inquiry. The Government refused all requests for a Public Inquiry on the dubious grounds that ‘the facts were already known’. Eventually Lord Morris, that champion of the disabled, stepped forward and established an inquiry of his own – the Archer Inquiry – entirely funded by private donations! (Incidentally, the inquiry managed to work their way through 20,000 documents, deliver three reports of recommendations, and find premises to hear the many personal accounts from survivors, all for the princely sum of £70,000 – thousand, not million!).
25 years of campaigning eventually led to a Private Members Bill, ‘The Contaminated Blood (Support for Infected and Bereaved Persons) Bill, tabled by the indefatigable Lord Morris again. The bill was widely supported by MPs from all sides of the house and achieved the distinction of being the first Private Member’s Bill to pass through to the House of Commons for consideration.
The Government, however, the same government who had refused a public inquiry, now refused to support the bill based on the private Archer inquiry. They refused to make time for the matter to be debated.
Undaunted, the Bill remained tabled, and could have been passed without debate.
Friday 5th February, arch Twit of the Government Whips Office, Kerry McCarthy was sent toddling down to the chamber to lodge a formal objection to the Bill being passed without debate.
[The Government] said ‘No’ to an official Government Inquiry, ‘No’ to giving oral evidence to the Archer Inquiry, ‘No’ to implementing the Archer Report in full, ‘No’ to a Commons debate on the Archer Report, ‘No’ to supporting the Contaminated Blood Bill and now it is saying ‘No’ to giving MPs time to even debate the Bill!
Game, set, and match to the Government. 25 years of campaigning hit a brick wall.
An estimated £1.5bn has been spent on perpetual reorganisation within the NHS, £1bn has been paid to private management consultants, such as those called in to help debt ridden NHS trusts, and £14bn had been overspent on the NHS information technology programme.
This Government has spent record amounts of money on relentless ideological reforms within the NHS that have misappropriated billions away from patient care. Thousands of people are dying at the hands of the NHS.
Needless deaths. Somehow I have no faith in campaigns for a public inquiry into the Staffordshire deaths. Even a self-funded inquiry will flounder when it comes up against an intransigent, unaccountable, totalitarian Government.
Do I think Cameron will do any better? Logically, No. Putting the NHS to rights would require wholesale redundancies amongst the bean-counters and pen pushers. He won’t want to put up the unemployment figures unnecessarily, so they will go on shuffling paper, draining money away from caring for the people who put their faith in the NHS to keep them alive.
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February 28, 2010 at 17:09 -
Dear Ms Raccoon,
Thank you for your enquiry.
You appear to be under some misapprehensions about the purpose of the NHS. You believe that it’s supposed to cure people, or something. Things have moved on since that philosophy was in operation, many decades ago. No, these days, the new thinking is that the real purpose of the NHS is to kill people, in as large as numbers as possible.
Let me explain. In the past, people were understood to have become ill as a result of bacterial or viral infection, largely through no fault of their own. But now we know that most disease is caused by ‘lifestyle’ factors. Smoking cigarettes, for example, causes all forms of lung disease, every kind of cancer (and not just lung cancer), all variants of heart disease, and more or less every other disease as well. And if cigarettes don’t cause these diseases, then drinking alcohol does so instead. Or eating meat. Or not getting enough exercise. And these lifestyles are what people have freely chosen to adopt. And so, it’s their own fault if they contract these diseases. And given there’s next to nothing that the NHS can do to cure them, the only option is to assist them to a premature death, which is where they were all heading anyway.
In modern NHS hospitals, doctors all know that anyone who has been wheeled through the front door is someone who has been trying to kill themselves all their lives with smoking, drinking, overeating, sex, lack of exercise, and so on. We simply try our best to help them on their way to the early grave they quite obviously seek.
I agree we’re not very efficient about it. MRSA is a nasty way to die. We’re hoping that new legislation on assisted suicide will allow us to open some assisted suicide facilities in our hospitals. Some people call them ‘gas chambers’, but these have some unfortunate resonances, and so we’re looking for another name for them. But, once the new facilities come online, we’re hoping to boost the NHS deathrate from its current figure of about 70,000 a year to something more like 1,000,000 a year. Patients with ‘lifestyle’ diseases will be able to look forward to rapid and immediate treatment in these new facilities, with waiting times of only minutes or hours.
We will, of course, retain the treatment centres for the old-style bacterial and virally-transmitted diseases. So if you get malaria, we’ll still prescribe drugs for its treatment. However, there is a strong argument that even malaria is a ‘lifestyle’ disease. You get it by going to West Africa. And anyone who gets malaria has only themselves to blame, and must have had a death wish of some sort, which we at the NHS will be more than happy to fulfil.
I’m sure you’ll agree that the new model NHS will be far more efficient than the old one. Hospitals will be much smaller. Wards will be small and very private. Patients will be treated immediately. Much of the old bureaucracy will vanish. Furthermore, the health of the remaining population of Britain will be greatly improved as unhealthy people are removed, and the population of Britain will fall towards sustainable levels. We’re hoping to bring the population down to 5 million or so by the end of the century.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me again if you have any further questions.
Yours faithfully,
Josef Mengele, M.D.
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February 28, 2010 at 17:17 -
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February 28, 2010 at 18:50 -
“Do I think Cameron will do any better? Logically, No. Putting the NHS to rights would require wholesale redundancies amongst the bean-counters and pen pushers.”
You could thin them out with hospital acquired diseases without attracting attention…
An expensive way to begin with – pay them to do nothing. Give them each a cupboard with a desk and a chair, some stationery and no computers. Stop collecting the stats. Stop getting in the way of patients being treated. Pretend the bean counters are not there and turn their old offices into new wards. If things improve you could then justify sacking them en masse. If they are worth their salt they will find productive employment. Getting over the State’s thirst for data is the biggest obstacle.
With respect to elderly patients I keep wondering if the bean counters and pen pushers ought to get out into the wards some of the time to help feed the older patients. If people are going in for one thing and coming out malnourished or dead, there are serious problems that need addressing on the ground. The bureacratic level is too far removed, too slow and too incompetent but everything has to have their approval.
The Stafford case makes me think a lot of the prison service – both are suffering due to overcrowding in a sense. Prisons cannot rehabilitate and protect the public because there are not enough places and hospitals cannot heal. Too many ill people squeezed into wards and not enough time between a bed emptying and being reoccupied. The person to be treated has become nothing more than a widget being stamped out to meet a production target. Their interests are too low down the order to be noticed.
Hospital is a crap place to be in at the best of times but that said, was there something wrong with the airy, easily (and regularly) cleaned ward/sheds of old? And when I mean old I’m going by footage from documentaries such as Carry On Nurse, Carry On Matron and Carry On Doctor. Hospitals these days look like office blocks, which given the amount of paperwork should perhaps not be a surprise. Could there even be something in the fabric of their construction or the layout that encourages outbreaks of disease?
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February 28, 2010 at 19:16 -
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February 28, 2010 at 19:57 -
> o. Putting the NHS to rights would require wholesale redundancies amongst the bean-counters and pen pushers.
and shit nurses of which there are lots.
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February 28, 2010 at 20:49 -
The NHS is a nightmare, my girlfriend has been through horrors there. Surly nurses, jobsworth attitudes, no one takes responsibility, so and so always off sick or unavailable, it is a veritable outer ring of hell.
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February 28, 2010 at 21:04 -
I spent a very long time in hospital when I was 20. I was in an orthopaedic and single sex ward with many elderly ladies with broken thighs, broken hips, pneumonia etc. The nurses then cared for each patient with genuine respect and fondness and were unfailingly good-humoured, kind and caring. Nearly 30 years later I have recently seen the treatment of both my parents in different hospitals and I haven’t witnessed a fraction of that capable and considerate care in place on today’s wards. Shame, shame, shame.
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February 28, 2010 at 21:15 -
2.Sadly, I had first-hand experience of this when my father lay dying in an NHS hospital last year. Most of the nurses were competent enough but clearly could not give a shit about either patients or relatives; I know that some sort of callousness is necessary otherwise you’d go mad in that job but this was something different. Loud chatting, oblique piss-taking of patients and families, and altogether a lack of respect were evident. I don’t expect them to behave like extras in The Nun’s Story, but the least they could do is have someone check on whether patients need help with feeding/toilet/washing without having to be pestered to do so, and keep the noise down ,and keep discussions about who got pissed/shagged last night off the ward and in the tea-room.
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February 28, 2010 at 21:25 -
oblique piss-taking of patients and families,
…………….
Spot on, Private Widdle. I refused to leave my mother’s side during the day because I wasn’t prepared to leave her open to the shockingly dismissive attitude with which I saw the staff dealing with other helpless and often distressed patients on the (mixed) ward. It was an ordeal. -
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February 28, 2010 at 22:13 -
I think the nursing profession as a whole has benefitted from superb PR- “underpaid, overworked angels”, whilst simultaneously mutating into something entirely different, to the extent that “nurses” don’t do a whole lot of your actual nursing any more( they all seem to have some sort of half-arsed speciality these days and quite a few of them don’t like feeding and giving bed baths from what I could see). But it was the general uncaring attitude that got to me; these were people at the end of their lives (it was a heart failure ward, and when you’re at that stage you’re not going to get any better) but there was no peace & quiet at all- it was yadda-yadda-yadda from all the staff, all the time. There was no dignity or respect, just a sort of grudging functionality from barely competent gobshites. My patience finally broke when the overweight Goth cleaner gave a driving lesson to a trainee in how to use the big floor scrubber thing which meant it went careening all over the ward, banging into furniture and off bed legs etc., whilst simultaneously shouting about her evidently complicated relationship over the din. I raised it with the ward sister:
“Why can’t she do the training elsewhere?”
“Where do you suggest?”
“Er, the end of the main corridor- there aren’t any dying people there”.
Blank look. They just don’t get it. They seem to think that doing what they do makes them immune from criticism.
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March 1, 2010 at 09:07 -
I don’t want to be unfair to nurses and carers. I know there are legions of kind and dedicated NHS staff doing their best to care for their patients. I am one of many people accompanying a cancer patient through their chemo and radiotherapy and I have to say that I am very impressed by the medical staff’s gentle and supportive treatment at every stage. Maybe it’s because the NHS service seems so good in the area of cancer treatment that it is so disappointing to witness how poorly the elderly can be dealt with in comparison.
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