Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wants a revolution in the way the National Health Service is run - and he is meeting opposition. Left unreformed, one newspaper says this morning, it is impossible to see how the NHS could survive. But would a change in the way it is run alter the disasters routinely occurring throughout the service?According to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, serious complaints about nurses have doubled in two years. The eighth annual staff survey of some 165,000 employees showed widespread concern about standards of care.
A Daily Mail review of a book shortly to be published - How We Treat the Sick, by Michael Mandelstam, said to be an expert on the NHS - provides a litany of neglect and abuse in hospitals.
A 17-year-old with meningitis was moved to two different wards by bed managers until the doctors treating her couldn't find her. She died. One woman died after being treated for six days with drugs meant for another patient. Twelve doctors failed to pick up the error.
Once upon a time patients didn't have bedsores. Now they are endemic. Between four and 10 per cent of patients develop at least one; with elderly patients with mobility problems, the figure can be as high as 70 per cent. An 86-year-old ex-serviceman was left screaming in agony in a Leeds hospital with multiple bedsores, one the size of a fist. His hip bone was exposed.
At least 400, possibly 1,200 patients at the mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust died through lack of care.
Matrons have been abolished; ward sisters, whose word once was law, have lost their authority. The problem, suggests the reviewer - himself a doctor - is not doctors and nurses, but chief executives carrying out Department of Health orders about finance.
Would someone please come along and save our NHS?
