Sunday 23 September 2007

Getting personal

So Gordon Brown tells Andrew Marr on TV today that he wants NHS care to be "more personal" (his words not mine)

So how can that be achieved when our hospital tells GPs that it wants them to no longer refer to consultants by name ( Dear Mr Smith, Dear Dr Spratt, etc) even if that is their, or their patients wish; indeed for some departments such as ENT and orthopoedics it isn't allowed at all anymore.

Meanwhile Brown's health minister Lord Darzi thinks that local hospitals should be shut and replaced by regional superhospitals, where he plans that operations should be done by robots.

More fatuous nonsense from the supreme leader, it seems.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today (25th Sept) Alan Johnson on BBC radio again said that patients can go to the named consultant of their choice. Simply not true under Choose and Book

Anonymous said...

So El Gordo is going to "deep clean" the NHS from bacteria such as MRSA and C. Difficile and have yet another new quango NHS body to oversee this.

Mmmmmmmmm

1. MRSA etc enters a hospital, not by Royal Mail or the sewers but via people as in patients, visitors and staff who carry it.

2. The "new NHS" is high people traffic [load factor] and high turnover [no stop over - get them in-get them out] methodology so beloved with the no frills cheap on-line booking UK airlines such as Easyjet / Ryanair / Jet2.com / Flybe.

3. If people bring the bugs into a hospital and you increase the volume of people travelling through and have a shorter turnaround time [so ensuring no time for proper cleaning from the subcontracted private companies in the NHS] then you will bring more bugs into hospital to infect more people - which no "deep clean" will cure.

4. Now remind me who came up with the idea of high volume - high turnover of patients? - why politicians of course!!!!

When you speed up the system things will go wrong - anyone with experience of the no frills turn-em-around now airlines will know that the safety margins fall to potentially dangerous levels when the margins are cut to facilitate targets ie time and money. Of course you won't actually see these dangers, but trust me, there are a few aircraft flying around in the no frills sector that adhere to the safety book / regulations by the skin of their teeth and all because time is money and high volumes [load factor] and short turnaround - is seen as cost effective on the balance [not safety] sheet