It’s a day of the week with a ‘y’ in it so it must be another day to talk about yet another example of gross and lethal NHS incompetence. Today’s offering is one of a growing number of similar cases where the NHS has royally screwed up the provision of something which is as basic as maternity care. The result of such awful NHS incompetence and error is another dead baby to add to the mounting number of similar dead babies, babies who could have lived were it not for the fact that they were born in facilities run by the ‘envy of the world (not)’ National Health Service.
Sky News said:
An NHS trust has been fined £800,000 for a “catalogue of failings and errors” that led to the death of a baby 23 minutes after she was born.
Wynter Andrews died in the arms of her parents, Sarah and Gary Andrews, on 15 September 2019 due to a lack of oxygen to the brain, shortly after an emergency Caesarean section.
Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust had admitted two counts of failing to provide safe care and treatment resulting in harm and loss at an earlier hearing.
Sentencing at the city’s magistrates’ court on Friday, district judge Grace Leong said: “The catalogue of failings and errors exposed Mrs Andrews and her baby to a significant risk of harm which was avoidable, and such errors ultimately resulted in the death of Wynter and post-traumatic stress for Mrs Andrews and Mr Andrews.
The District Judge added that although there were systems in place to ensure safety of mothers and babies, but these systems failed. The guidance that the doctors, nurses and midwives were supposed to follow to keep patients safe was ignored and not implemented.
This is yet another baby who could have lived but which did not. This was a baby killed by NHS incompetence and systemic procedural slackness. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to clap for an organisation that does this and maybe if you did clap for the NHS you should give your head a little wobble and not do it again. The NHS is a piss poor healthcare system, it’s not a deity. It should not be worshipped and its failings need to be exposed.
I’d rather the NHS than something run by the likes of Capita, or ANY organisation with shareholders. It worked very well in the past, before the cuts to staff and repairs, equipment and just about every thing else.
Camp Basra had a “money know object” hospital which makes the average “general” look like it’s stuck in the 1970s.
Sometimes I look at the NHS and how it’s managed and wonder whether the Trotters from Only Fools and Horses would do a better job of running it. With the NHS it’s not so much how much money is spent but how it is spent.
@Julian,
“before the cuts to staff and repairs, equipment and just about every thing else.”
How exactly do you figure that?
The NHS gets more money and usually an above inflation raise year on year (not always).
The BBC has actually done a series of charts to show the changes from 1948 to now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44560590
The only thing that has gone down in real terms is the number of beds, but that is because more is done (or not done) in the community.
But that begs a question: how come 68,000 nurses could serve 480,000 beds (>7 beds to a nurse) and give decent care in 1948 whereas 217,000 nurses serving 120,000 beds (so less than ONE each) cannot? And that neglects the provision of “Healthcare assistants” who do a lot of the basic personal care, thus relieving the huge nursing force of those responsibilities.
The situation wrt doctors is even more dramatic; an almost ten-fold increase in numbers over the time.
There are other factors of course; increasing sophistication and breadth of treatment, closure of convalescent homes (which were a significant number of total beds earlier), an increasing population, but the NHS has increased in size at a vastly greater rate than the population.
There are other ood reasons why healthcare has expanded of course, new treatments come along all the time, but the idea that the NHS has been “cut” in any way when its share of the public purse has increased from ~10% to ~30% (which negates the effects of inflation) seems counter-factual to me.
It seems to me that there are two narratives at play here: one, building on the failures of the NHS, such as its decadal failure to plan for the winter pressures, or the growing waiting lists, exacerbated by COVID, is to claim that the NHS is being “starved of funds” or “cut”. This often as a political club to beat the party in power.
The other is shown by statistics (even by the BBC!!) which is that far from being “starved” the NHS is gulping down an ever greater %age of the public purse but outcomes are now getting progressively worse, it is beset by a never-ending series of examples of appalling lack of care from maternity units to end-of-life care. Some care is very good (I’ve been lucky in that), but some is diabolical.
Whatever your view of the NHS, surely it must be obvious that something is very wrong.
One thing is clearly the lack of GP provision, another is obviously “social care” problems that lead to bed-blocking (those annoying old people again). Both of those clearly need proper solutions.
One solution to bed-blocking would be a return of convalescent hospitals which I mentioned earlier, they were a sort of “half-way house” between a clinical hospital and the home. They provided relatively basic care (and thus were a good training ground for nurses under experienced supervision when that was much more “hands on” than today), but were linked to both hospital and GPs (who, shock!, visited them to check up on their patients’ convalescence) so that a relapse resulted in prompt re-admission to the main hospital.
Personally, I take a rather dim view of those GPs and other doctors who either retire or cut back their hours because their pension pot is overflowing its >1 million pound limit and don’t want to be taxed on their further contributions. This seems to me to be a problem of greed on the Doctors’ part, which is a worrying thing in what is supposed to be caring profession, where patient care – and not rate of growth of pension pot (already delivering >£60k pa) – is, or should be the first concern.
There’s a lot more I could write, but this is a comment, not an article
I speak as I see. Number of training places for doctors. Down. Amounts of money for repair and maintenance (writing as an architect who spent the entirety of his career working for the NHS. Down. Writing as a cancer patient (again) last three years. Number of staff on the wards. Down.
Number of staff having to work ridiculous hours. Up.
Number of staff leaving due to poor pay and increased stress through having to cover for missing colleagues. Up.
Waiting times for appointment. Up. Waiting times for results. Up.
You can chuck statistics around, provided by goodness knows who, but I see it at the coalface.
But thanks for responding.
Some of the problems with staff availability are down to the restrictions on the numbers of people joining medical courses. But what I don’t think is the problem is money. The NHS gets plenty of money but in many cases it just spends it badly or spends it on useless fripperies.
I have come to believe that the biggest problem with the NHS is how it is constituted. It might have been the right solution for the 1930’s or 1940’s but it might not be the best model for comprehensive healthcare today.
Aside from some of the non-jobs like “compliance” , “Governance” and “IT Architecture” and the huge numbers of bean counters and number crunchers I never saw much in the way of fripperies.
Is a sensory garden a frippery ? I suppose it depends how many weeks you’re a patient ?
I do recall refurbishing departments beneath leaking roofs because there were funds for “capital expenditure” but rarely “maintenance”.
What I did see was a colossal waste of time and money brought about by the infernal “internal market” and the requirement to outsource/lease/hire just about everything. This can’t be an exhaustive list, I couldn’t possibly know them all, but these are examples from Basingstoke, Southampton and Portsmouth QA. Hospitals where I worked or/and was treated.
An entire cardiac wing built in a sort of kit building, fully equipped & staffed and leased
PET CT Scanners & Staff, within the building, leased
CT Scanners in Portakabins outside the building, leased
All the week end staff in endoscopy – agency
A considerable number of nurses & consultants, on the “bank” (agency)
The beds !!!, yes really, leased beds
Catering
Porters
Security
Temporary clinical accommodation in modular buildings everywhere you look, leased
The Car Parks, some weird Private Finance Initiative designed to rook patients and staff.
The hospital pharmacy(!) shipped out to Lloyds Chemists
And then you have the tenants, Costa, WH Smith, Boots, a clothes shop, Greggs. Some hospitals, such as Southampton, are entered via a small mall.
And so it goes on. Repeat that across most district & regional hospitals, all that wasted money chasing the leases, agency fees and rent.
Then the fragmentation of regional health authorities in to NHS Trusts. All that economy of scale lost, the job carried out by a single department now replicated across every trust.
Oxford, where I worked, at one point had four possibly five separate Trusts providing healthcare.
You are correct, the NHS has become unrecognizable but the finger has to be pointed to those who demanded competition and outsourcing above patient care.
Net zero and diversity staff do constitute an unnecessary frippery which as you point out is replicated across every hospital trust. Maybe an internal market could have worked but the way it was implemented didn’t work out that well. I’ve nothing against competition in health care just as I’m not against competition between schools in order to provide the best and most cost effective service to the customer. Why should people not choose the GP or hospital that most suits them and which has the best reputation? Economies of scale in some areas such as drug purchasing and expendibles like bandages and other similar disposables is indeed something that the NHS could have done but the downside of that is that you get the centre choosing your healthcare and what drugs and other things that you might need.
The NHS model, at least for modern times is broken and it needs to be repaired but how we repair it other than hosing the thing down with the entire GDP of Britain is the big question.
Please don’t wish the US model upon us. 45% of the population unable to receive basic healthcare
It doesn’t have to be a binary choice between the sclerotic and often terrible NHS system and the US system where medical bills are a major factor in personal bankruptcies. The French, German, Dutch and Israeli systems might be better than both of the US and the current UK systems.
When you tot up the elements of privatisation already in place and listen to certain of HMGvt. talking about paying for GP and Outpatient appointments it feels like it’s heading that way.
In a couple of hours I’m off to QA (Portsmouth) where I’ll park in the privately owned car park, pass the security (contractors), see porters (contractors) and be seen in a hospital built with private money ( PFI) which the Trust lease back. Chances are the nurses will be agency.
So, paying for the consultation doesn’t feel so far away actually
(and I expect I’ll grab a coffee from COSTA, not from League of Friends) and pay three times as much.
Privatization by stealth.
You mentioned PFI. This is a disaster that Labour foisted on the public sector. Now we have hospitals paying over the odds for their facilities which might have been funded more cheaply by another route. Still PFI kept public spending on hospital property off the public sector’s books for a while and helped to make Gordon Brown look better than he was.
You can choose your GP. Where I live all the catchment areas overlap, I have a choice of four.
As to choosing hospitals, probably not. I want to be treated close to home and where my family & friends are. It might be clinically fractionally to my advantage to be seen in London, but I couldn’t expect my friends and family to “just drop in” when they all live here.
A while back Southampton had no paediatric oncologist, so children had to be treated in London. The financial and social impact that had on families was terrible. Healthcare needs to be delivered where it is needed.
Too much choice = too much duplication = too much waste. It’s my supermarket analogy again. Just how many breakfast cereals do we REALLY need and where do we suppose it all ends up after it goes out of date ?
I’ve seen at least two departments built, fitted out, and never used. Patients are more interested in just being seen, never mind choice.
And then if you provide choice you have to staff those choices. From where ?
There was nothing wrong with an NHS based on regions and districts and the change was driven by ideology.
Diversity isn’t entirely without its merits. It doesn’t do any harm to have staff who speak the same language as the patients.
Aha but you get your choice of GP only due to geographical chance as when there’s an overlap between districts. Why not let anyone choose any doctor in, for example their city or town? If the particular GP practise is popular then they can hire more staff to pick up the load and it might encourage the less popular doctors to up their game. For specialisms like paediatric oncology I concur that being treated at some distance from home imposes unnecessary strains but why not instead financially and socially assist those families whose kids are needing to see specialists in major teaching hospitals? Spending money on helping parents be close to their children whilst they are being treated is a far better way to spend money than on some of the non jobs that the NHS seems to always be able to find money for.
It’s your preference to be treated locally, others may be more concerned with the quality of care or the reputation of the hospital. Allowing choice might not mean waste or duplication, it all depends how this choice is managed.