Of debts & superbugs
Mortality rates in NHS hospitals are under the spotlight with the release of figures from Dr Fosters showing those for individual trusts. I must caution readers though that the research did not investigate causes of death at individual hospitals & that baseline measurements are difficult, though the figures were standardised to take into account a range of risk factors, such as the age of patients, sex, social demographics, the level of deprivation in the area and whether a patient has any other illnesses.
And the cure is worse than the disease. The penalty for losing a star (for example due to financial failings) is to lose money available to services which then leads to wards closed the rest being overcrowded, then leading on to outbreaks of MRSA & C. diff with people dying at the end of the trail. The people designing these sorts of management protocols do not understand clinical care.
Even the winners in this lottery are not immune from money troubles either.
I have to call this BBC headline misleading & point out that the study did not set out to establish a positive correlation between publication of league tables & success rates.
The researchers, led by Mr Ben Bridgewater, said: “If publication of surgical mortality data had driven surgeons to turn down significant numbers of high risk patients we would expect to see that reflected in the number of high risk cases coming to surgery.
“This study suggests that the effect may not be as large as is feared.
“If public disclosure can drive data collection and analysis, but does not create significant risk averse behaviour, its introduction may be beneficial in other areas of medicine.”
Very poor standards of journalism.
I would like to see doctors refusing to provide cover for PCTs who are neglecting patients health. If the PCT doesn’t have the funds, do not pretend that there is no clinical need for the treatment.
Pretending that treatment for wet Age related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is only needed once the patient has gone blind in one eye and developed wet AMD in his second eye is unethical.
One in five secondary school pupils in England, some as young as 11, took illegal drugs last year.
More opinions surface about the progress of the NPfIT & Choose and book.
Sir - As one of the 23 British computing professors who, for a year, has been urging Parliament to rethink NHS IT plans, I agree with Max Pemberton (Health, April 23) about the limited value of computers.
Twenty years ago, when computers were a mystery to most, the job of our profession was to develop the technology and find ways to exploit it.
Now that the Government has fallen in love with the machines, our role has switched to warning, against our own career interests, that computers are only tools, of often overestimated benefit, which can easily be deployed in ways that do more harm than good.
Prof Geoffrey Sampson, Uckfield, Sussex
I have to agree with the figures below:
Unison called for a new zero tolerance policy and said people who attacked or threatened staff should face stronger penalties.
Figures published at its conference in Brighton showed there were almost 59,000 assaults on NHS staff in England between 2005 and 2006. The highest number was in London, 5,700, followed by West Yorkshire and Trent which both reported more than 3,600.
And the threatened strike action exercises the minds of more people including the FT.
A summer of discontent across the NHS in England and Wales was threatened yesterday by Unison, the public service union, in protest at a below-inflation pay increase.
Representatives of the union’s 450,000 health workers voted unanimously at their conference in Brighton to ballot for industrial action up to and including strikes.
I wonder how Andy Burnham finds the temperature of the water today.
The takeover battle for Boots hots up with offers & counter-offers.
Not to mention Astra Zeneca’s purchase of MedImmune, the biotechnology group, for $15.6 billion.
But the scandal surrounding its alleged unethical sales tactics deepens with more tapes released.