Colchester Hospital vs Military Hospital

Sapper Ashley-James Hall, 20, whose legs were blown off in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, was being treated in Colchester General Hospital for suspected meningitis.

He is now being treated in isolation at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where injured troops are cared for.

He still has open wounds from the explosion and has contracted a bacterial infection in his legs.

According to the family, the infection is similar to MRSA and means he must be kept in isolation. However, staff at Colchester General Hospital wanted to put him back on a general ward.

/facepalm

Dad Stephen said: “He has got an infection in his legs and it was felt by us the hospital could not deal with his injuries. So he discharged himself.

“Military care is better than the NHS. You ask for something to be done on the NHS and it takes hours.”

If it happens at all, that is.

Mr Hall said: “At Colchester one set of doctors tells you one thing, then another set say something different.

“Ashley was not happy with his care.

“Ashley has an Afghan bug similar to MRSA, but they were trying to put him in with the general public on a general ward.

“We were having to shout and scream at them.

“He is in an infection control ward in Birmingham.

“Colchester doesn’t have the same medical facilities. We were dealing with new doctors all the time. It was just appalling.”

The family have angered the hospital by going to the media.

A hospital trust spokescreature whines:

Mark Prentice, a spokesman for Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We are disappointed that Mr Stephen Hall has concerns about the care given to his son Ashley-James but also that he has chosen to raise them directly with the media and not with us.

“We would urge him to contact the trust as soon as possible so that we can thoroughly investigate and report back to him.”

And will you find that their concerns are well-founded in that investigation?

“As a result of Mr Hall contacting the Gazette, we have carried out a brief, preliminary investigation which indicates that the care given to Ashley-James was entirely appropriate at all times during his recent stay on the emergency assessment unit at Colchester General Hospital.”

That’ll probably be a ‘no’ then…

NWA*

Wearing hoodies and baseball caps, and festooned with 'bling' jewellery, they are doing their best to look like American rappers.

Sadly, the fact that they are middle-aged British nurses is all too apparent.

Well, it's crazy, sure, but what they get up to in their own time is no business of...

Oh:

This is how one health care trust has decided to spend public money - by producing an £1,800 rap video about how to clean your hands.

It is available to watch on NHS Milton Keynes Primary Care Trust's own channel on the YouTube website. It can also be bought in DVD form for £25.

Must be selling like hot cakes, I bet?

Yet in the month the DVD has been available, not a single copy has been sold.

Shocker...

* Nurses With Attitude

MRSA and cDiff figures fall

Hurray:

There has been a fall in the number of death certificates mentioning MRSA or Clostridium difficile (C diff) as a contributory factor in why someone died, figures showed today. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of death certificates mentioning C diff fell by 29% between 2007 and 2008, to 5,931.

... ah, I see...

This is the first year that mentions on a death certificate have fallen since records began in 1999.

Source: The Metro

Bacteraemia.

Bacteraemia "recorded" Only

I always think that is an interesting word. To the lay person it means " bacterial infection". To medics, we all know that bacteraemia cannot be diagnosed without obtaining a blood culture. Essentially, the patient may have MRSA but if the blood culture is not taken by the doctor, they cannot be diagnosed to have " bacteraemia".

The Health Protection Agency lists this article "Quarterly Reporting Results for Clostridium difficile infections, MRSA bacteraemia and GRE bacteraemia"

So the language is particularly interesting. They specify " bacteraemia" not simply "MRSA infection". It is a nice way to hoodwink the public.

So what happens if the blood cultures are not done by doctors?

We go to the NHS Documentation and see what the recommendations are

Blood cultures are taken to identify patients with bacteraemia. There are many signs and symptoms in a patient which may suggest bacteraemia and clinical judgement is required, but the following indicators should be taken into account when assessing a patient for signs of bacteraemia or sepsis:

• core temperature out of normal range;
• focal signs of infection;
• abnormal heart rate (raised), blood pressure (low or raised) or respiratory rate (raised);
• chills or rigors;
• raised or very low white blood cell count; and
• new or worsening confusion.
NB: Signs of sepsis may be minimal or absent in the very young and the elderly.

So if the above symptoms are not present, there is no blood culture. For many elderly patients the above symptoms are not present. For instance, there may be no temperature change or there may be atypical signs and symptoms. It also fails to address the fact that many people don't behave like the textbooks. Each Trust has their own protocols for blood cultures. Put it this way, doctors don't do cultures unless they really have to or to put it another way, they are not encouraged to do so unless it is imperative. The criteria of blood cultures is arbitrary, open to interpretation and without proper guidance or guidelines, it is open to varying subjective assessment.

So if blood cultures were not done, there would be no diagnosis of bacteraemia. If there was no diagnosis of bacteraemia, there would be no record in the government statistics. If there is no record, the government can legitimately say that those aren't MRSA bateraemia cases. For all those patients who have MRSA in their sputum or on their skin or even wound MRSA and subsequently die, are not part of the statistics for the government, yet they all have MRSA infection.

To illustrate the above, my father had MRSA in his sputum, MRSA on his skin, a high white count but because no blood cultures were done, MRSA was not on his death certificate and he is not on the government statistics cited as a " MRSA related death". I wonder how many patients come within this group? I wonder if the actual number of MRSA deaths is much higher than the "bacteraemia" counted up.

It is my view that there is a culture of not recording MRSA deaths by not doing blood cultures. It is quite a clever way of convincing the UK population that we don't have a problem or that the problem is improving. It would be nice to know how many blood cultures are actually done on patients with an "infection". :). I believe the answer would be " very few".

Dr Rita Pal
http://www.ward87.blogspot.com
http://www.nhsexposedblog.blogspot.com

Alan Johnson's speech at the Labour Party Conference

Just caught the umpteenth rerun of this, yadda yadda, blah blah blah, but this stuck in the craw:

In the mid 1990s infection rates rocketed in understaffed and dilapidated hospitals. Last week I announced that NHS staff had succeeded in cutting MRSA infections, not by half as envisaged but by 57% in three years.

Woah! Fact check!

Deaths from MRSA increased from 51 in 1993 to 800 in 2002 (BBC)

Deaths from MRSA increased from 955 in 2003 to 1,168 in 2004 (The Torygraph)

Deaths from MRSA fell slightly from 1,652 in 2006 to 1,593 in 2007 "the first time the number of MRSA-related deaths has fallen since the ONS began keeping records in 1993" (BBC).

So we are still way above the numbers back in 1997, eh lads?

Meanwhile, the number of death certificates mentioning Clostridium difficile increased from under 2,000 in 2003 to over 8,000 in 2007 (BBC).

If you're going to tell Big Fat Lies, don't lie about things that can be disproven by scratting around for twenty minutes on the internet, FFS! Ah well, at least Tractor Production is up, I suppose ...