Well, I Can't See THIS Going Wrong, Can You..?

An NHS efficiency drive may result in hospital appointments being outsourced to call centres in India.

Not when it's worked so well and proven so stunningly popular with customers in all other industries!

I mean, it's not as if anything bad has ever happened befo...

Oh:

The proposal comes despite a scandal two years ago when the confidential medical records of patients at one of London’s top private hospitals were sold on by Indian IT staff.

/facepalm

Head Injury? Well, Maybe...But You've Had A Few Sherbets, Haven't You?

Following on from Dick Puddlecote's post yesterday, it seems alcohol + illness makes it hard to diagnose - particularly for those medics who have already made up their minds:

Confused and in distress, this man seems to be in need of medical attention.

But when this picture was taken, Arnold Siddall had just been dumped outside a hospital A&E department because staff thought he was drunk.

In fact he had suffered a fractured skull, but no one at the hospital read a form written by a paramedic which said the 47-year-old had hit his head on a pavement.

So he was turfed out, and eventually arrested. Whereupon, on suffering a fit, he was brought back to hospital. Too late.

Now a coroner has ruled that Mr Siddall could have survived had he been treated at once, rather than a full 14 hours after his fall.

His family released the poignant image of his final hours yesterday as they demanded assurances that no patient could ever be betrayed by the NHS in the same way.

Good luck with that!

The trust has paid his family a five-figure out-of-court settlement negotiated through solicitors Pannone and has apologised for Mr Siddall's treatment.

Anyone want to bet this won't happen again?

Nice Guidance Not

From the Times today

She is also among the one in five sufferers — mostly women — for whom the most common drug, alendronate, is not suitable, meaning that she is prescribed the more costly strontium ranelate. But under draft guidance from NICE, she said, “my doctor would be unable to prescribe an appropriate medication until I had fractured a bone and my bone density had got considerably worse.

“This seems like madness. It's going to cost the NHS a lot more than the treatment costs if people break their bones.”

Big Government f***s up, yet again (2)

The new contracts for NHS dentists which our very own government introduced* turn out to be a fraudsters' charter.

* Or indeed imposed, depending on your point of view. I know of nothing that suggests NHS dentists were actually lobbying for such changes, above and beyond the usual "Can we have some more money, please?"

"GPs paid more for working less"

This is hardly news, is it?

Average GP Partners salaries are now £114,000 a year, as against £56,000 in 2001. Adjust that for the fact the average working week is now 36.3 hours, not 43.1, that's equivalent to a payrise of 130%.

The generic headline "Government allows taxpayer to get conned out of billions by rent-seeking monopoly for umpteenth time" would cover it.

"More people can choose to die at home"

I overlooked this fine article on a recent pronouncement by Health Secretary Alan Johnson MP (Lab, Kingston upon Hull West and Kessle).

Faced with headlines like these, a more accurate statement would be "More people will choose to take their chances at home".

NHS Fuckwittery (10)

Back in May, they came up with some Big Scary Numbers, claiming that 200,000 NHS admissions a year were alcohol-related.

Hmm. Not scary enough, obviously. So they've now revised that up to 800,000 admissions a year.

But despite this, they admit that only "£2billion of NHS money is spent every year treating patients with alcohol-related diseases", which is no higher than the guesstimate in my previous post, which is in turn only 2% of overall NHS cost and a small fraction of alcohol duty revenues. And it's not "NHS money" FFS, it's taxpayers' money.

The most outrageous claim is that "six per cent of all NHS admissions are in some way caused by drink". So what? Seeing as half of us are drunk for a couple of hours a day, I'd say this is pretty much par for the course.

"Cocaine victim numbers surge"

Shock! Horror!

The number of cocaine users admitted to hospital has more than quadrupled in eight years, it was revealed yesterday ... gasps The Sun breathlessly, ... The worrying statistics point to a dramatic rise in the drug’s popularity over the last decade..

It then continues with some hard facts ...
Cannabis poisonings nearly halved during the same period. Good stuff. Why is that not worthy of a headline?

The Government figures reveal 740 people needed emergency treatment after bingeing on cocaine during 2006/07, compared with 161 in 1998/99. Wot? Out of maybe half a million users, 740 overdoses? I'd guess that the bulk of these relate to crack-cocaine anyway, which is a truly vile drug, not the good old Bolivian marching powder that merely turns you into an arrogant arsehole and makes your nose bleed. Even if this guess is wrong, it's not much of a message is it "Kids! Don't do cocaine! There's a one-in-a-thousand chance you'll overdose if you take it regularly for a year! And going by these stat's, zero chance that you'll die!"

The majority – 629 – were men and their average age was 29. Yeah, so? Cocaine is taken predominatly by relatively wealthy men in their twenties, any fule kno that.

... the number of cannabis users needing treatment fell from 171 to 96 – and heroin overdoses fell from 1,962 to 1,530. Isn't that something to celebrate - out of one or two million cannabis users, only 96 needed treatment? Ditto heroin, with 300,000 users?

Last month the Government revealed drug-related hospital admissions had soared by more than a third since 2002. Many of the 215,447 admissions were for legal drug overdoses or accidental poisoning. So, er, by these figures, illegal drugs caused about 3% as many admissions as legal ones? And even legal drugs only accounted for 2% of all admissions (approx. ten million). Hardly a f***ing epidemic, is it?

H/t EUReferendum, who makes further very interesting points.

NHS Fuckwittery (8)

In brief ...In all, 127 [NHS] managers lost their jobs. The average pay-out each is to receive will be just under £120,000.

Look, if those jobs were superfluous, they should never have been 'created' in the first place? Is anybody going to take the rap for that? No? I thought not.

That this sort of practice is rife in Northern Ireland is hardly surprising.

"Health inequality gap widening"

Nulab are so obsessed with the fact that better-off people's life expectancy is improving faster than that of people in 'deprived areas', that they forgot to give themselves a pat on the back for improving life expectancy by an average of 2 years over the last decade (at enormous cost to the taxpayer, of course).

Oh ... which is a piss-poor result really, seeing as life expectancy increased by an average of 2.7 years every decade over the course of the twentieth century.

Dave don't got no clue (3)

Apparently, Dave The Chameleon wants 'the Tories to become the party of the NHS'; has 'axed his party's previous proposal to subsidise patients to go private'; as well as calling for fines on hospitals who allow patients to become infected.

Pop quiz, which bits of this rhetoric did Blulab nick off Nulab and which ones did Nulab nick off Blulab? I don't know any more. And I don't care any more either.

FFS, there is no point fining a publicly funded body, yet another reason for having non-state owned competing providers (combined with taxpayer funded vouchers AFAIAC); only then would fines have any effect whatsoever. To the extent that fines are necessary - competing providers would not only lose business if they were to infect their patients, but would also face legal actions and higher insurance bills.

NHS Fuckwittery (7)

From the BBC website today.

"NHS on course for large surplus" and "Bed crisis sparks hospitals alert".

Dude, WTF?

NHS Fuckwittery (6) - Broken collarbone

Read about The Daily Brute's recent experience here.

NHS Fuckwittery (5): Deep Clean

The Goblin King decided this week that he was going to rehash Michael Howard's motto "Cleaner hospitals" in a desperate attempt to lose* the next election**, suggesting that hospitals all have a 'Deep Clean'. The professionals have rubbished this idea with a vengeance.

I like the bit about "regular use of hydrogen peroxide vapour generators" does this make people gradually go blonde?

*Which appears quite possible after all, according to pollsters who extrapolated yesterday's by-election results, although Vindico thinks that extrapolating like this is bollocks.

** The wheels are rapidly coming off the economy, the credit crunch and house price crash have started. Whoever is in power over the next few years will earn a reputation for economic incompetence that will see them out of power for decades. So you're better off losing the next election. The Tories seem to have twigged this ages ago - what appears to be bad management and incompetence is in fact a super-slick operation. Sir John Major has said that he sometimes wishes he hadn't won in 1992 for precisely this reason.

NHS Fuckwittery (4)

When I hear people talking about "... markets, competition and choice ... improving our health service", my ears always prick up. Altho' the terms are fairly meaningless in themselves, I do believe that the aim must be a largely taxpayer-funded NHS with competing providers*, as in so many other countries.

The logical conclusion is that people could claim vouchers (for no more than full cost of NHS equivalent treatment) and go completely private, paying the top-up out of their own pockets or out of voluntary private insurance.

So why does trade union f***wit Dave Prentis come out with this in today's FT "We were really pleased that Alan [Johnson, current UK Health Secretary] made no mention of markets, competition and choice in improving our health service"?

Also in this article - a quango realises it is pointless and dissolves itself! Now there's a first!

* Who should own such hospitals and clinics is an interesting debate. I see no reason why they should not be owned by charities, churches, trade unions, the local authority as well as insurance companies and private operators. As long as they are competing!

NHS Fuckwittery (3)

Neil Record, pensions guru, calculated that the true cost of unfunded pensions promises in the NHS* was about 35% of salary. In other words, if it were a funded scheme in the private sector, employer/employee contributions would have to be around 35% of headline salary.

The purely notional contributions are currently employer 14% and employee 6%.

Well, whoo-pee-do, the NHS has realised that this is a tad on the low side, so they have increased employee contributions by ... (wait for it) ... a whacking 0.5%.

And these are still notional contributions. So all it means is that for a headline salary of £20,000 the true gross will be £18,700. The figure £1,300 gets jotted down on the employee's contributions history, but it doesn't get paid into any sort of physical fund.

*under the old retire-at-sixty final-salary scheme, that is closed to new entrants but still applies to those already in the scheme.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

One of the six bullet points* under the Conservatives' hugely expensive "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" ad-campaign at the 2005 general election was 'Cleaner hospitals'.

They lost very badly.

The Goblin King now has decided to adopt exactly this pledge as the main plank of his next general election campaign.

Jesus H Christ, what goes around comes around, doesn't it?

*Those six bullet points look pretty good to me.

"Charge drunks for treatment, say Lib Dems"

Says the Grauniad headline (via Tim W).

Besides the serious point that drinkers pay for these externalities via VAT, alcohol duties and so on, I know that the leadership hates Charles Kennedy, but talk about kicking a man when he's down.

NHS Fuckwittery (2)

Not posted much recently as I managed to slice off quarter of a fingernail with a Stanley knife a couple of days ago, which makes typing rather painful.

Highlights so far:
1. Local GP receptionist ignores you for five minutes while filling in a twatty form and then say "Sorry, the nurse is busy, go to A&E instead"
2. To get seen at A&E (at 11 in the morning) you have to go through security (who sends you to reception), a receptionist (who sends you to yet another receptionist), who in turn asks "where did the accident happen?". I was still in shock and couldn't think of anything witty so I answered honestly.
3. After one hour, a nurse takes off my plaster and says "Ooh, that looks nasty, go and take a seat in reception, we can see you in one hour"
4. After about an hour, a doctor has another look and says "Ooh, that looks nasty, we'd better stick a bandage on". The same nurse comes back in and puts a bandage on and gives me a tenanus shot, which didn't hurt at all but started throbbing like crazy a few hours later.
5. Went back to local GP today to have bandage changed. As cute as a button that nurse!
6. On way out of GP's surgery, notice pile of 6-page glossy "England goes smoke free" leaflets translated into 22 different languages (I counted). Jesus H F***. Is this really necessary?
7. Oh yes, my local hospital consists of half a dozen buildings set in a few dozen acres of prime East London (plenty of grassy areas &c). The whole damn' site is a giant 'no smoking' zone. Off the top of my head, even if only 100 of the thousands of people who work there smoke five fags per shift, that wastes about 100,000 man hours per year* (because they have to walk all the way to the exit at either end of said site). Times say 1,000 such hospitals in UK makes 100 million wasted man-hours per year, wages £20 per hour, total cost £2 billion per annum, or 2% of the total NHS budget.

Thanks to Lawrence, waiting for a bandage to be changed because his GP's nurse was on holiday and the GP couldn't be arsed to hire a locum, for helping me while away the time.

100 people x five walks x 12 minutes = 100 hours x 3 shifts per day = 300 x 365 days per year.

NHS Fuckwittery

After yesterday's dental treatment, I returned to reception and proferred my debit card as usual.

"Sign here" said the receptionist, brandishing an A5 pale blue/dark blue form bearing the 'NHS' logo.

"Why?" asked I. "I'm paying for my treatment, not asking for a freebie"

"It's a form to say that you are paying the charges and are not entitled to free treatment"

"Yes, but that is blindingly obvious, that's why I'm giving you my debit card. What is the point?"

"We have no idea what the point is" summarised the receptionist "but sign and date on the front and again on the back, please. It's for their computer"