I hope you are sitting down.
I wasn't sitting down when the announcement came on the
radio and the shock was awful. I cannot afford for you to injure yourself and
sue me when you read this blog so hold on to something.
NICE have announced findings that under-staffing in hospitals
can be dangerous.
OK breathe.
Yes, NICE the National
Institute for health and Care Excellence (what happened to ‘f’, ‘h’ and ‘a’?) have made an
important announcement, after much consideration and looking at information and
reports and statistics and especially figures for preventable deaths in
hospitals. Apparently under-staffing can harmfully affect numbers of adverse
incidents and patient mortality.
OMG
Let us only hope they do a parallel and more specific study
into whether if you are tired and over worked you become more likely to make
mistakes. I wait with bated breath for the outcome of that investigation.
Don’t confuse the NICE mentioned above with that other
organisation with the same acronym, the National
Institute for Could-have-worked-that-out-for-ourselves Easily.
All I can say, once I get my breath back is, thank god we
have clever people getting paid lots of tax-payers’ money to tell us these
things.
Being just an ordinary Jo (or Amanda) I can only hazard a
guess at some of the mysteries of life and wonder about things like – would
drinking tractor engine oil make you poorly?
To be honest there was rather a lot to take in this week in
terms of confusing information. Evidently it’s not ok to legally (but
immorally) avoid tax if you are a comedian but it is ok to illegally avoid tax
if you are a singer and a mate of David Cameron. And it’s not ok to play a
record with the ‘N’ word in it if you are an old DJ but it is ok to say the ‘N’
word (and be a misogynistic git) if you present programmes about cars and are a
friend of David Cameron. How confusing is life?
So I suppose – if the things that should be straightforward
are complicated then it makes a kind of twisted sense if things that are
utterly obvious are then presented to us as if they are full of mystery and
require stats and reports and serious public statements.
But back to the findings that surprised NICE.
The weird thing was that just a couple of days before this
stunning announcement, a friend of mine told me about her elderly mother who died in
hospital after being given the wrong dose of one of her medications. The lady
in question was old and poorly but the mis-medication possibly hastened her
death and in an unpleasant way. While I felt huge sympathy for my friend and
her family, I have to admit, my gut reaction was to also wonder at the plight
of the nurse. How many elderly patients was she caring for? How qualified was
she? How much support did she have? Was there a senior clinician available at
the relevant time? Because one thing I do know from contacts in the medical
field is that when these things blow up it is usually the person at the coal
face who gets it in the neck. It is rarely the more senior medic, almost never
the hospital manager and it is never EVER the politicians who landed the NHS
with the targets and PFI contracts that led to much of the present misery and a
funding crisis.
SO take a deep breath before you listen to the news or read
tomorrow’s papers – they may announce that crossing the M25 without looking
increases your risk of getting run over.
This week’s recommended blog from the archives is
No.32 NHS & the
Condom of Common Sense.