Do nurses and doctors have time to care?

Last week we had D Cameron declaring that nurses will in future be expected to do hourly ward rounds.

Today we have the 'Independant' Tory created 'NHS Future Forum' brand nurses as lacking care and compassion.

Is there a link?

Do you think that nurses deliberately ignore patients, are nurses so uncaring these days if so why?

The Nurses who have enjoyed the esteem privalege of caring for me, have ALL been professional, dedicated and extremely profficient! I cannot fault them, indeed no one in the ward had a bad word for them. The term "likkle minx" may have surfaced now and then.

This at a ratio of one nurse to 6 patients and one auxilliary to 3 patients in a general surgery ward.

Funny how we never met any of the "admin" staff when in the ward.

Ploiticians come out with such rubbish every now and then - I think he is letting his belly rumble. I prescribe Colonic Irrigation for all politicians! To be administered by MR Hornby and OW and witnessed by the rest of us in turn!

Join the Queue!

Nurse, The screens, please.

This at a ratio of one nurse to 6 patients and one auxilliary to 3 patients in a general surgery ward.

how about 1 trained nurse to 12 patients and 1 care assistant to 4 patients on a Dementia ward?

Quote : " I prescribe Colonic Irrigation for all politicians! To be administered by MR Hornby and OW ..."

I'm busy that day.

Whenever it is.

Besides, the only contact between me and most politicians' bottoms would be my foot. - encased in a steel toe-capped boot...

Health Ministers are advised to stay very, very healthy indeed.

I have just been watching Confessions of a Nurse on MORE4.
I would like to suggest that others watch it on 4oD....

It shows that nursing is nothing like Holby city.........

The screens please, Nurse!

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"Sorry, sir - under the new Coalition NHS it'll cost you extra if you want screens.

But don't waste yer cash - you've got nothing we haven't seen before...although maybe not that size....!"

However some of them, a small minority, have time to be complete axrseholes, apparently.

Phil Hornby wrote:Quote : " I prescribe Colonic Irrigation for all politicians! To be administered by MR Hornby and OW ..."

I'm busy that day.

Whenever it is.

Besides, the only contact between me and most politicians' bottoms would be my foot. - encased in a steel toe-capped boot...

Would it not be better to give the Tory party a LOBOTOMY, oh sorry I forgot they have already had one of those years ago.

The Law of Unintended Consequences had a further effect in the introduction of Graduate Nurses.

Clearly there must be a benefit in having Nurses on a Ward who have qualified through a University degree. (Apart from anything else it makes it difficult for Registrar Doctors to patronise them).

The practical effect however is that they are reluctant to get involved in lifting patients physically, arse-wiping or making a sandwich for a patient late at night.

More = Less

OW
I quite agree that with the introduction of the greduate nurse there has been a rise in the 'Too Posh To Wash' nurse but conversly this state of nursing has been pushed on to them..

Many bosses will tell a Trained Nurse who wants to get on with providing 'hands on care' to their patients that they are not being paid the 'Big Buck' (£12.50 per hour) to do what healthcare assistance can do...They are told that they have to complete the paper work, to have an over view of the care that is being provided only..

The paper work, they are told is needed for when the CQC come and do a spot check because it's the paper work they base their reports on how good or bad the care being given is....

Being a nurse who was trained under the old apprenticeship style of training where 'the only way to learn was through experiance', as one of my nurse tutors often said....

I have worked with nurses, who having completed 3 years degree course and gained the right to put RGN after their name, are not able/allowed to be left incharge of a ward for at least a further 12 weeks as they are not deemed capable to be left alone to look after their patients......

This is a far cry for when I was training and left incharge of a 30 bedded orthopedic ward, on nights with a Night Sister/Charge Nurse coming around every hour to check that everything was OK and that was only six months into my 3 year course........

Red to Lobotomize a Tory infers that said Tory has a brain in the first place.

Latest post from my blog skwalker1964.wordpress.com:

My wife is a staff nurse at a large NHS hospital, on a ward where pretty much every patient is seriously ill or is able to do very little for themselves and so requires ‘full care’. To protect patient confidentiality, I won’t say which hospital or what type of ward, and I’ll use ‘them’ instead of him/her.

I’ve written before about the government’s plans to reduce public-sector wages in lower-paid parts of the country – which are usually Labour strongholds, and so can be ‘punished’ with minimal negative consequences for Tory electoral performance – and why these are economically stupid. At the same time, the government wants to reduce pensions for doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers in all parts of the country, while increasing their retirement age and raising pension contributions – even though the claim that public pensions are unaffordable is a lie.

And then, of course, the government infamously wants to push through a disguised, piecemeal privatisation of the NHS via Andrew Lansley’s odious ‘Health and Social Care Act‘, even though our NHS is the 2nd most efficient and effective health service in the world, and costs half as much as the US system the Tories want to emulate.

To get away with such patently wrong decisions, the government needs to win public opinion, or at least neutralise it. One of the main ways the Tories do this is ‘divide and conquer’, trying to set one part of the public against another. Over the last couple of years, the NHS has suffered waves of propaganda assault to paint the NHS as inefficient, doctors and nurses as selfish if they complain, and especially if they want to take action to protect themselves. And, sadly, in some quarters, these assaults have been effective. A look at the NHS hashtag on Twitter will quickly reveal plenty of people bashing the NHS, complaining about waiting lists, and even some actively espousing the government line that privatisation means efficiency, in wilful ignorance of the facts. The Tories are deliberately trying to reduce our esteem for the NHS we’ve always treasured.

So, on the basis that good information is the right antidote for bad, I thought I’d tell you about my wife’s last shift. She’s at work again now, doing the third of three ‘double’ shifts. These shifts typically run from 7 in the morning until 8.30pm, or from 8am until 9.30pm, at least notionally, though it’s the rule rather than the exception for them to finish later (the exception is getting paid for the overtime. So, even if she finishes promptly, it’s a 13.5 hour shift. There are supposed to be meal and drink breaks, but the ward my wife works on is short-staffed even at full complement, and there are always people off sick, often with work-related illness/injury or stress. So it’s very unusual for her to get a break, and meals are often taken ‘on the go’, if at all.

Yesterday’s shift was a tough one, but not unusually so. My wife ate a working breakfast at about 1pm – the first chance she had to eat or drink anything from an 8am start. She ate ‘lunch’ at around 6pm – taking turns between a bite of her sandwich and feeding a ‘specialed’ patient who can’t feed himself and needs not only to be fed but to be constantly watched by a nurse. She did this so that the nurse who was ‘specialling’ could get away to take her first break of the day.

In between these ‘breaks’, here are a few of the highlights of her day (I know these details because she gets home from work exhausted, frayed, and needing to offload her day before she can start to unwind), some of the highlights were:

- bathing and changing the soaked dressings of a bedridden patient who is so big that even the powered hoist can’t lift them, because there isn’t enough room between the bed and the ceiling. Because of this issue, the bathing takes a team of 4 staff about an hour of hard physical work. The patient, in spite of being well-educated, never says ‘thank you’.

- bathing and giving injections to a patient with cancer which has spread to the brain, making them erratic and prone to lashing out physically at those who are taking care of them.

- dealing with a succession of patients who are doubly incontinent, or can’t get to the toilet without assistance, with regular resulting exposure to the kind of sights and smells that most of us would baulk at.

- dealing with an irate family member who was angry because their relative hadn’t received a cup of tea promptly when they’d asked for one, even though all the nurses and healthcare assistants were run off their feet.

And, in between these ‘highlights’, a constant rush of answering buzzers, changing dressings, administering injections, giving out meds (with great care of course to make sure they’re done right), lifting patients, feeding patients, and – absolutely critical but certainly not allowed for by the bean counters – comforting patients, calming them, treating them like human beings to mitigate the depersonalising experience of being seriously ill in a big hospital. And all of this in such a constant rush that she rarely gets to take the weight off her feet for a moment, let alone take a proper break.

My wife is diligent to the point of obsession. She loves her work and her patients, regularly receives thank you cards from patients or relatives who, of course, use the clichéd ‘angel’ to describe her. She treats them with respect and compassion, puts their needs routinely above her own, and comes home exhausted both physically and emotionally from each shift. And she lives in quiet terror that one day she or one of her colleagues will slip, make a mistake, because of the sheer frenetic pace at which they’re expected to work so that the management don’t have to employ more staff.

While she’s definitely paid better than minimum wage, her salary in no way reflects the conscientiousness, commitment and sheer bloody hard work she puts in. And in a way, that’s fine – she knew when she took the job that the work was hard and the pay wasn’t great. But now, because they think they can get away with it, the government wants to reduce her pay. Well, not her pay just yet, as the pilot for the plan is taking place in the south-west, where private companies and NHS trusts are forming a pay cartel so they can trap staff into accepting reduced pay because there’s nowhere else for them to go in the region.

As I’m sure you can imagine, it drives me insane when I hear a minister, government spokesman or other party with a vested interest on the TV or radio, spouting how the NHS is inefficient, staff pay and pensions are great and they shouldn’t be complaining, or otherwise trying to smear the Service in the eyes of the nation at large. When I hear them, I find myself suggesting, usually aloud, that the lazy, self-satisfied sods should try working on my wife’s ward for a week, and asking whether they’d then dare say that the staff don’t deserve the pay and pensions they were promised, and more on top.

I think the answer’s obvious. Don’t you?

Next time you hear the government peddling its propaganda, please remember this post and others, and don’t fall for the lie. And if you want to send a message to them about what you really think, here are two petitions you can sign to do so:

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Please sign, and get your friends to do the same, via Twitter, Facebook, or smoke-signal!

Not intending to take anything away from the harrowing account above, it's evident that we could all help by adopting here a practice which is routine abroad.

Relatives of the patient are expected to deal with the personal everyday requirements such as washing, feeding, making cups of tea and assisting with toilet-trips. Thus leaving trained staff to attend to medical requirements.

Won't happen here though, will it? We're paying someone else to do that, and we're entitled to it.

I partially agree OW, however isn't that where the assistants come in?

Surely the main problem is that the staff as well as dealing with the patient are having to deal with visitors at the same time. Perhaps we should step back to the times when there were visiting times in the afternoon and evenings, allowing the staff freedom and time to do what they are paid for?

Care Assistants are often expected to do some of the tasks that trained nurses used to do......

Having visiting times would do little to help staff as they would then have to deal with up to 30 relatives in a very short space of the visiting time...

Trained nurses are expected to devise plans of care for each patient and record the out comes, checking a patient can take seconds but writing the findings can take minutes...


The powers that be, CQC PCT etc are only interested in what is written down.

In the private home I work in there 18, yes EIGHTEEN, areas where care plans have to be in place these must be reviewed every FOUR weeks, as a minimum, and to provide the evidence for these reviews each section should have a daily entry,,,, now multiply this by 16 patients...and this is as well as the other things that SK's wife has to do ........

As an aside this being the private sector we are subject to the fact that if there is a fall in the number of patients there can be a parallel fall in the number of staff on duty.......the ratio is set numbers of patients to number of staff currently One Trained Nurse to 18 patients and One care assistant to to 6 patients....No thought/allowance is given to the needs of the patients so you can have 12 patients 6 of whom need help with meals and only 3 staff to help them eat their meals.....and with some patients it can take 30 minutes for them to complete their meal........

Typical Sits Vac:

2 x Nursing Auxiliaries to work the following rotational shifts
22.5 hours per week on days (3 shifts)
21 hours per week on night duty (2 nights)

This is a rotational post which will require the successful candidates to work both days and nights on the Inpatient Unit.
Pay scale - Overgate Band 2/3 dependent on qualifications, a minimum of NVQ Level 2 in Care is desirable.

(The Pay is likely to fall within the range £16K to £19K before tax)

astradt1 wrote:Care Assistants are often expected to do some of the tasks that trained nurses used to do......

Having visiting times would do little to help staff as they would then have to deal with up to 30 relatives in a very short space of the visiting time...

Trained nurses are expected to devise plans of care for each patient and record the out comes, checking a patient can take seconds but writing the findings can take minutes...


The powers that be, CQC PCT etc are only interested in what is written down.

Yes, my wife often laments the way in which the written plans become the measure of whether good care was given, the amount of time they take, and the temptation for the occasional less-engaged member of staff to write something without necessarily doing it.

I have noticed in the Chemo Suite, that some staff nurses SEEM to prefer to be sitting at the computer.

Why oh why have a well trained pair of hands (staff nurse) sitting all day at a pooter? If computing is her job, she did not need all that nursing training! IS the expensive nursing training so unimportant that is can be cast aside to change to pooter operator?

Give the task to the trainee nurses! Stick another year onto their training!

THEN -
You will find who is "Patient Friendly" who is "Pooter literate" and who is just a lazy sod here to ride on everybody elses back!

After the training, the pooter operators will have an understanding of what they are writing about! - A VERY unusual concept in this day and age. Also it would do away with the present "Poacher becomes Gamekeeper" style we have now!

Posted on my blog just before Lansley's announcement that beds may be reduced and wards & even hospitals closed, and newspaper revelations of mass redundancies. Please see the original article at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] for links to sources:

Andrew Lansley’s up to something. I don’t know exactly what it is yet – probably some new push in his semi-covert privatisation the NHS, or in his assault on the pensions, pay and conditions of health staff – but I know it’s coming.

As I’ve written about before, every time this government wants to take something away from a group that has the nation’s sympathy, it prepares the ground, doing its best to erode public support, even to demonise the target group. Over the last couple of weeks or so since the publication of the King’s Fund annual survey of public satisfaction with the NHS reported a record fall in satisfaction since the coalition government took over, I’ve seen a carefully orchestrated campaign being conducted. In a variation on the theme of ‘damned by faint praise’, Lansley is ‘defending’ the NHS in such a way as to vindicate the government’s handling of our biggest national treasure, while fostering a perception that the NHS is slipping. Let’s face it, the record 70% satisfaction rate in place under the last Labour government doesn’t exactly work in favour of the Tories’ contention that the NHS is in need of reform and improvement.

No, indeed. Since the coalition came to power, there has been a constant ‘drip drip’ of negative statements and media coverage of the NHS, designed to diminish the public’s affection for the Service. This has been successful to a degree – at least among people who haven’t had to use the NHS since the 2010 election. The King’s Fund survey covers the general public, not just people who’ve had experience of the NHS recently, so it’s all about public perception rather than experience. This deterioration is entirely the fault of Lansley and his government colleagues – both in how they’ve spoken about the Service being unaffordable and inefficient (it isn’t!) and by stretching the NHS’s resources as thinly as possible – setting it up to fail. All to ensure a smooth ride for his corporate masters’ and cronies’ takeover of the NHS while trying to avoid being held responsible for the situation. And people who don’t know any better are likely to fall for it.

The antidote to bad information is good information. My first article on a day in the life of an NHS nurse, about my wife’s experiences as a staff nurse on a busy ward treating seriously and chronically ill people, is one of the most-visited I’ve ever written. Since Lansley is seemingly being successful in his plan to lower the standing of our health-workers, and is planning his next push to denude the National Health Service and steal from its hard-working staff, I’m going to tell you about another, anything-but-untypical day:

My wife is coming off the back of a set of double and late shifts, and starting on a run of four night-shifts – she’s just gone out to work not long ago. She felt ill during the week, probably from being worn out and run down, but still went to work because others were already off sick and she didn’t want the ward to struggle or her patients to suffer, though fortunately she’s feeling better now. I’ve been away most of the week, but got back in time for her to tell me a little about her week at work, and get it off her chest before she had to set off for another shift.

On Friday, she was scheduled to do a modified ‘twilight’ shift, starting at 4pm and working until midnight, so she could be there to help manage the handover between late and night shifts. Because of a staff shortage, her ward manager phoned and asked if she could do a normal late instead, starting at 1.30 and finishing at 9.30pm. During the shift, one of the other nurses had to leave the ward for 2 hours to accompany a patient on oxygen (patients on oxygen are never sent unescorted) to a different part of the hospital.

As things were running behind because of this, because the staff were already thinly stretched and because she cares too much for her colleagues and patients to just go home at the allotted end of a long and tiring shift, my wife stayed on until midnight anyway. She almost certainly won’t claim for the additional 2.5 hours’ overtime – she hardly ever does, even though I tell her she always should. Her patients come first, and she’d hate to leave her colleagues in a bind.

A few ‘highlights’ of her day:

- Cleaning, on multiple occasions, a female patient with explosive diarrhoea. As the lady was absolutely mortified by what was happening, to minimise her distress the nurses keep a very cheerful, matter-of-fact demeanour while doing everything they can to reassure her that it’s fine, she can’t help it and shouldn’t worry about it. Most of us would run a mile, or vomit, or at the very least wrinkle up our noses in evident distaste – but for my wife and her colleagues, it’s not an option they’d ever consider. The patient’s wellbeing – emotional as well as physical – has to come first. So they smile, and get on with the job.

- Still on the ward is the poor lady with lung cancer that’s spread to her brain, making her behaviour erratic with occasional sudden violence. On this day, however, she wasn’t violent – at first. She just decided she didn’t want to be on the ward any more – and made a sudden dash for the exit in her nightgown, with tubes and nightdress trailing. Considering she’s so ill, she’s very fast and very strong. One of the nurses managed to just grab hold and hang on – but it only slowed her down, and the nurse was pulled along the polished floor like a water-skier behind a slow speedboat while calling for help ‘stat’ (I don’t know whether she actually said ‘stat;’ – it might well have been something more fruity!). As other nurses arrived, they were able to stop the patient’s progress to the exit – but then she started to lash out, trying to get away. The nurses hung on, risking the blows, kicks and teeth, until security could get there and help subdue the patient, at which point she was sedated and slept.

- Holding the hand of a ‘lovely, lovely lady’ while doctors broke the news to her that her recent difficulties in swallowing are because she has advanced, incurable cancer of the oesophagus and has only months to live. My wife cries her eyes out over each patient like this – and there are many, it’s that kind of ward – but she held back her own tears so she could be a support and comfort to a relative stranger in a time of terrible distress. She saved her tears for later, away from the hospital. Just occasionally, if she’s been particularly close to a patient, she has to ask a colleague to cover for her for a couple of minutes while she gets herself together. But it’s very rare – the ward’s so busy that the staff can’t afford the luxury of a ‘time-out’ to shed a tear.

- Finding – somehow – the time to sit with a ‘lovely old man’ with a permanent tracheotomy and so unable to speak, while he struggled to communicate to her what he needed; giving him time to get his message across so he didn’t feel either isolated by his lack of voice or that he was being a nuisance by taking a long time to make himself understood.

- Holding a busy ward down as the only qualified nurse for a ward of 20 or so patients, with only a 3rd-year student for support, during one of the 2 hours her colleague was missing, because there was no-one available for emergency cover until an hour later.

- And again, just like during the last day I wrote about, there was no opportunity to take a meal break or even get a hot drink. Just once she managed to make a cup of tea, but then there was a ‘code’, a patient whose breathing or heartbeat was in crisis. She knocked her ‘cuppa’ back cold – and then rolled up her metaphorical sleeves and dived back into the fray.

These are just a few of the things she tells me about as she unburdens herself to me over a (this time, hot) cuppa so that she can pick herself up and get ready to start all over again – this time through a whole night. There are a number of incidents I’d love to include, to really give you a proper feel for the day she went through, but I don’t feel I can as the details might compromise the confidentiality of a patient or colleague – but I hope that I’ve done enough to give you an accurate flavour of the life and dedication of our health-workers.

So I’ll end with a plea: when Lansley does whatever he’s preparing the ground for; when the latest carefully-timed, biased ‘exposé’ or statement is released to tarnish the image of the people who look after us when we stink of piss, shit, infection or despair; or when he just continues on his road of denuding our Health Service and setting it up to fail so he can sell it off cheap to his mates in the name of ‘reform’ and ‘efficiency’ – then please, please remember what you’ve just read, and see what’s going on for the calculated, cynical pack of lies that it is. And tell others, so they know to do the same. Our nurses, doctors, health-care assistants, porters etc – and our police, and teachers, and other public-sector workers – deserve better than what’s being done to them, and better than a cynical, greedy government of spoiled, self-interested ‘posh boys’.

And if you’re one of those public servants, don’t despair. Not yet. We do ‘get it’, most of us – and we take our hats off to you.

And here's the one I posted the following day, as Lansley's plans & threats, and news uncovered by the TUC started to appear in the media. I'd gladly have been wrong:

I started last night’s post ‘Another day in the life of an NHS nurse‘ by saying that while I didn’t know what, nominal-Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s recent posturing was a clear sign that he was planning some new assault on the NHS, some push in his stealthy privatisation of this national treasure. In most circumstances, I’d probably enjoy, just a little bit, saying ‘I told you so’, but not in these circumstances.

In today’s Daily Torygraph, it was announced that Lansley foresees ward closures, reductions in bed numbers, and potentially even whole hospitals being closed down. Without question, this is a ‘softening-up’ exercise to get people used to the idea, in preparation for a planned, intentional program of closures and reductions, which will be followed by the sale or give-away of NHS facilities to private companies, on the premise that the reduced, weakened organisations need to be ‘saved’, ‘rescued’, or some similar word.

For Lansley to state that such closures will ‘lead to better services’ is clearly ludicrous. But the government has a planned ‘route’ to dismantling the NHS in phases, because they know that the British public would never tolerate it happening all at once. It’s the old principle of boiling a frog – raise the water-temperature gradually, and the frog will sit happily in the water until it’s too late.

Our media – and most especially the publicly-funded BBC, which should be able to resist political and commercial pressure – is being criminally negligent in its non-reporting of this issue. The bankers’ crisis receives saturation coverage – but while that is a serious case of fraud, the theft of our NHS is ‘robbery writ large’. And it’s receiving barely a mention.

So we, the British public have to do the following:

1) Wake up and realise what’s happening. Get – and stay – informed.

2) Spread the word: tell your friends, and saturate Twitter, Facebook and other social media that the government can’t mute with the wake-up call, and with information exposing this Tory crime.

3) Get involved:

- join or organise protests & information campaigns

- join your local NHS trust and fight from the inside

- join the Labour or Co-operative parties and find ways to help them fight – or to get them fighting, if they’re not already

- write to your local MP, and to Ed Miliband and his shadow ministers, and demand that they make the NHS a key campaigning issue – and that they commit to a complete repealing of the loathsome ‘Health & Social Care Act’ and a full renationalisation of everything that the Tories have stolen and sold off by the 2015 general election.

This country loves the NHS, and should justly be proud of its status as a national treasure and one of the best health services in the world. This government is stealing it by degrees, using deception and coercion to keep each phase quiet while it prepares the ground for it. We have to end that ‘stealing-by-stealth’. Now.

Hot on the heels of the Francis Inquiry into the going on at Stafford it seems clear now that the Tory's blame the nurses for the lack of care.....

Today we have the announcement that student nurses will have to undertake a period of time during their training doing 'hands on care' before they can start their degree in nursing courses....

The government has ducked the issue of minimum staffing levels for wards, taking the easy option of just meddling with nurse training.....

They seem to have missed the point that nurses have so much paper work to complete 'If it's not recorded it hasn't happened' mentality, which just means that inspectors like CQC and PCT's can check on care by just looking at records without the need for speaking to patients or their relatives.....

Most nurses I know would love to be able to spend time providing the type of care the government claims it wants to see but just do not have the time for fear, and I really do mean fear, of failing to fill in some form or other which the PCT or CQC will demand to see on their next visit.....

I have lost count of the number of unpaid hours I have put in just making sure that I have completed the correct number of forms and documents at the end of a 13 hour shift......

On a non-statistically valid experience of one observation, I was visiting a friend in a Teaching Hospital and became aware that upon an inaudible signal, all of the nurses disappeared off the ward. They were clustered in the Nurses-station around a senior nurse who was obviously quizzing the student nurses on their knowledge in anticipation of an up-coming examination for promotion.

All excellent stuff, but this "cramming" was at the expense of Patients, so why isn't it within the Hospital staffing provision?

astradt1 wrote:Hot on the heels of the Francis Inquiry into the going on at Stafford it seems clear now that the Tory's blame the nurses for the lack of care.....

Today we have the announcement that student nurses will have to undertake a period of time during their training doing 'hands on care' before they can start their degree in nursing courses....

The government has ducked the issue of minimum staffing levels for wards, taking the easy option of just meddling with nurse training.....

They seem to have missed the point that nurses have so much paper work to complete 'If it's not recorded it hasn't happened' mentality, which just means that inspectors like CQC and PCT's can check on care by just looking at records without the need for speaking to patients or their relatives.....

Most nurses I know would love to be able to spend time providing the type of care the government claims it wants to see but just do not have the time for fear, and I really do mean fear, of failing to fill in some form or other which the PCT or CQC will demand to see on their next visit.....

I have lost count of the number of unpaid hours I have put in just making sure that I have completed the correct number of forms and documents at the end of a 13 hour shift......

The entire point of the government's focus on 'target culture' and a supposed lack of compassion as the causes of poor care (and the deaths-that-never-were) at Mid Staffs is to avoid acknowledging at any cost the main thrust of Robert Francis' report: that understaffing was the key cause.

This is because they have no intention of deviating from their plan of exacerbating short-staffing in order to set hospitals up to fail, thereby rendering them ripe for break-up and privatisation while at the same time eroding public affection for the NHS and the Labour party's 'ownership' of the 'friends of the NHS' position.

As John Bell of the Iona Community said:

”If you want people to retain their dignity then you have to ensure that the people who care for them have the time to be kind”.

But that doesn't fit this government's agenda at all.

astradt1 wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

This is just a work of genius. Thank you for posting it!

It was reported today that after EU directives were brought into force a few years ago in Britain that stated that "no junior doctor should be forced to work more than 48 hours per week ( averaged over six months )", we are again seeing these doctors being made to work up to 100 hours per week because hospital chiefs have found ways to get round these EU directives.

When this was originally reported everybody concerned agreed that it was a very dangerous policy that would eventually kill patients and even some doctors and at that time the public were pleased to see that the practice of overworking young doctors had stopped.

NOW... it seems, that the practice has started all over again.

Read more about this latest rip-off of doctors basic human rights [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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Well folks are you worried about this latest bit of news, and what do you suggest we should do about it ?

Regards.....

Papaumau.

A sprat to catch a mackerel.

Long hours now. Six-figure salaries to follow.

see also Solicitors/Accountants/Vets/Architects etc.

You are probably right there Oftenwrong but the authority and the rules should not be simply ignored by people who are just too greedy.

The "Iron Lady" once said that "greed is a good thing" ( as one might expect her to say BTW ), but now this "greed" is destroying the core of British society everywhere it shows it's ugly face.

There is only right and wrong as choices and as long as the managers in our NHS are not forced to do what is "right" we are going to see the negative "greed" ethic rolling over every other positive value in British society.

Regards.....

Papaumau.

Hunt's Cunning Stunt
(Don’t attempt to say that after a few drinks, unless your name is Jim Naughtie.)  

An article by junior doctor Roshana Mehdian, which is summarised here:-

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Please read the article in full here:-
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