I normally give the Conservative Woman blog a bit of a wide berth these days for various reasons. Partially it is because I find it contains a bit too many tin foil hat shriekers for my liking and therefore has become less of a place for sober debate by social conservatives than it used to be. It used to be a ‘go to’ place on my early morning reading list but over time I found that I could take or leave Con Wom and I now mostly leave it.

However, occasionally it does put out some good stuff which attracts me and which I find sensible relevant and worth reading. A very good example of a piece worth reading on Con Wom is a recent article on the latest in a long line of NHS scandals, the preventable deaths and disablement of babies at the East Kent NHS trust maternity service.

The article by Dr Tom Goodfellow and based on a report into failures by the Trust makes for harrowing reading. It paints a bleak picture of a hospital riddled with bad management and bad practises.

Dr Goodfellow said:

For those familiar with such reports this one is depressingly similar; the same issues come up again and again. A litany of stillbirths, neonatal deaths and brain-damaged babies with the usual associated poor clinical practice of botched assessments, missing records and inadequate foetal monitoring.

Dysfunctional staff relationships with bullying and harassment being regularly reported, but with no effective resolution. Consultants with ‘challenging behaviours’, that is complete bastards, were allowed to continue unchecked. They were frequently missing from daily ward rounds, and some were reluctant to attend emergencies during the night despite being on call. Kirkup also found poor relationships between the midwives and with the other doctors.   

The effect of this on staff morale was appalling and associated with rapid staff turnover. Relatively inexperienced junior doctors were afraid of escalating concerns for fear of an ‘earful’ and in consequence developing clinical issues were not recognised, ignored or dealt with incorrectly.

Equally bad was the attitude of (some) staff to the parents with shocking lack of compassion and failure to listen. I was quite distressed reading accounts of some of the behaviour meted out to the mothers. When things went wrong the Trust covered up and obfuscated. There was an attitude of blaming the patient which sadly, in my experience, is all too common throughout the NHS where minimising reputational damage is deemed more important than addressing the issues.

There is much in Dr Goodfellow’s article that is depressingly familiar from other NHS scandals. There’s the consultants who expect to be treated like gods and whose behaviour to both staff and patients leaves a lot to be desired. Junior doctors who should be able to ask questions of more senior staff were bullied into silence and of course the patients were treated like shit. Mind you it would not be ‘our’ NHS if the patients were not treated like shit wouldn’t it? I’m really not surprised to see allegations of cover ups and dissembling as my family have been on the receiving end of such behaviour from NHS staff.

The NHS is dysfunctional, disastrously managed and dangerous to the patients who put their lives in the hands of medical staff employed by what has become an effective state monopoly on healthcare. I believe that Britons should have access to a universal healthcare system but we all deserve much better than we are getting from the NHS. I never clapped the NHS when we were all encouraged by the Government to do so because I’d seen how awful the NHS could be and there was no way was I going to applaud that. The fact that so many clapped for Britain’s clapped out healthcare system shows that either there are not enough people who have compared the UK system with those better run ones overseas or that there are an awful lot of morons who still believe the lie that the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’.