There are many good reasons why other nations have not copied Britain’s National Health Service. Chief among those reasons are that a healthcare system that is both funded and controlled by the Government provides not just a crap healthcare system riddled with dangers and problems, but also gives ample scope for conflicts of interest and putting the patient last rather than first.
However another story has come to light that may well show that Britain’s hospitals are not just places of bad treatment and so poor in cleanliness that hospital acquired infections are a major problem, but may also have very poor staff vetting systems. We know from previous cases such as that of Dr Harold Shipman and nurse Beverley Allitt, where medical staff have abused their position for their own sick and twisted ends and were assisted in doing so by poor vetting and monitoring.
This other story is one that I must be careful on commenting about as the matter is sub judice is an appalling allegation that has come out of Britain’s premier children’s hospital Great Ormond Street. According to press reports, a former porter at Great Ormond Street has been charged with a string of sex offences against children and young men. The report does not specify whether these offences are related to alleged conduct inside the hospital or outside of it but the hospital itself has said that they are ‘working with the police’.
Sky News said:
A former porter at Great Ormond Street Hospital has been charged with sex offences against children.
Paul Farrell, 55, of Camden, north London, faces 84 charges including rape, attempted rape, sexual assault of a child under 13, and indecent assault on a male, police said.
The charges relate to seven victims, with the alleged offences committed between 1985 and 2018.
Farrell, who was arrested in January, is in custody ahead of a plea hearing at Wood Green Crown Court on Friday.
That is an extensive period of alleged offending, 32 years is it not? We will of course have to wait until any future trial to find out the details of this case. Whilst I accept that Mr Farrell is to be considered innocent until proven guilty, this case does raise questions about the vetting of employees in the NHS. The offences for which Mr Farrell has been charged may of course have nothing to do with the hospital or on the other hand they may do, I daresay all will be revealed in due course.
But this story does make me want to ask whether there are any effective procedures for the NHS to ensure that those individuals who may have a record of suspicious behaviour or dangerous and illegal peccadilloes or even those whom have been linked at one remove from those with such behaviour, are prevented from gaining access to those who are at their most vulnerable in hospitals? Personally I doubt that there are. The NHS is to a large extent a law unto itself and it’s quite possible that the onerous and time consuming vetting that is required for the ordinary citizen to take part in voluntary activity such as helping out at a playgroup or similar, may be being bypassed by the NHS either in whole or in part? This is something that we should both debate and be concerned about.
My concern is to what standard are employees in the NHS, especially lower level employees, being vetted? Are they just being vetted to the basic standard or are they being vetted to the same standards that a security guard or a teacher would be vetted to?
We have had some form of vetting and barring system for years and we need to ask how effective it is in keeping out those with bad intentions from the NHS? My guess based on knowing how crap the NHS is would be not very effective at all. There could be hundreds and hundreds of dodgy people doing lower level jobs in the NHS which nobody really knows about.
In a small firm, everyone knows that they can be fired on the spot if they foul-up – large organisations give the irresponsible somewhere to hide, and the lack of common-sense and accountability can be mind-boggling.
The airport – (forget which, but here in the UK) – that had a vetting procedure for new employees to protect the public against potential terrorists, but allowed new staff to work “air-side” anyway while waiting for the checks to be carried out.
Ferry captains who regularly set off with the bow-doors still open to save a couple of minutes, trusting that somebody else would take responsibility for closing them – WTF did he think was going to happen ?
NASA fools decided to save a few beggarly dollars by selecting a grade of rubber to seal the fuel tanks that went brittle and didn’t seal at low temperature (it was so totally unsuited that it went brittle when placed in a glass of cold water with ice-cubes – let alone the way-below-zero temperature of liquid rocket-fuel). The suppliers knew it wasn’t suitable, the engineers knew it wasn’t suitable – but they all decided that it was somebody elses’ problem: It was, too – Sally Field and the rest of the Challenger crew were incinerated.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of residents and travellers in West London are subject to the same fuckwittery as the long neglected repairs to Hammersmith bridge are “someone else’s problem” as opposed to the local authorities & GLA. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8983941/Jobsworths-say-SEVEN-YEARS-140m-repair-Hammersmith-Bridge-fix-hand.html
Yes but the out of touch political elites on local councils and to one trick pony grievance mongering scum like Sadiq ‘Saracen’ Khan the residents and travellers of West London are just ‘the little people’ aren’t they? Those who need to travel to work or to see relatives and friends are unimportant to Khan, the GLA and the councils. It’s completely unsurprising that H and F is a Labour Council and the borough on which the other side of Hammersmith Bridge sits is run by the Illiberal non-Democrats.
Phil – Sally Field? Nah. It was Mustang Sally Ride.