One of the big problems with Britain’s National Health Service is that the quality of service and the quality of its staff is not consistently good, but then again neither service nor staff quality is consistently bad either, it’s frankly a mess. A person can be extremely lucky as I have been and mostly find themselves being treated by good quality staff, in a reasonably timely manner. So far I’ve only had the occasional encounter with a type of member of NHS staff who appeared, to all intents and purposes to have time travelled from a healthcare position in the old Soviet Union.

When NHS staff are good they are very very good but when they are bad they are truly terrible. Sadly there are an awful lot of terrible staff working for the NHS. People like this nurse from a BBC story about NHS neglect from late March.

The BBC said:

A “deplorable” nurse who left a dying man to go on her break and took food from the trays of patients has been struck off.

Teresa Bacon, who worked at the Royal Blackburn Hospital, ignored one woman’s request to change her dressings.

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust said it acted quickly when concerns were raised.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) found all 17 allegations against her proven.

The trust referred digestive diseases ward nurse Ms Bacon to the NMC in May 2020.

Its investigators spoke to her colleagues, and to a woman referred to as “Patient B”, who said Ms Bacon had shouted at her and ignored her pleas for help.

The most serious complaint related to her conduct towards a man referred to as “Patient A”, who began experiencing breathing difficulties on 28 April, 2019.

The NMA’s independent panel heard a health care assistant (HCA) – referred to as “Witness 5” – approached Ms Bacon several times asking for help with the man.

But the Band 5 nurse “failed to respond in a timely manner”.

This nurse also failed to use an oxygen mask on a patient properly and did not call a doctor for a patient when a doctor was clearly needed. The nurse also verbally humiliated patients, stole food intended for patients and carried out her work in an ‘uninterested’ manner. There was copious witness evidence to Ms Bacon’s failings and at least in this situation we have praiseworthy NHS staff who knew that this woman was a danger to patients and did the correct thing and reported her to the nursing regulatory authorities and hospital management.

This is clearly a person who should not be in the nursing profession, with such a disinterested, careless, dishonest and uncaring attitude to their work should be somewhere else, anywhere else, but not in nursing. Ms Bacon has been removed from the list of registered nurses and did not turn up to her fitness to practise hearing.

In this situation the NHS actually worked to get rid of a dangerous and uncaring employee and the staff did the correct thing and helped to remove a wrong’un from their midst. But I very much doubt that Ms Bacon is the only appalling and uncaring nurse that is employed by the NHS and we should not take the admirable behaviour of the staff who voiced their concerns about her as representative of all NHS staff. It’s quite possible that in other less well run NHS facilities bad staff could be operating and being covered for by equally bad colleagues. In a well run and consistently good healthcare system bad staff should be dealt with swiftly by management who should take seriously complaints from the bad worker’s colleagues. Unfortunately the NHS is not consistently well run and I doubt that all NHS hospitals and other NHS settings will have acted as swiftly as the Royal Blackburn Hospital has managed to act in this case.