The NHS today

[Hugh]

NHS to day is is just great as far as I am concerned. I guess some areas are better than others. In the last few years I have had two hernia operations and the treatment I got from nurses and staff could not have been bettered. The hospital was in Newark. And for both operations I only had to wait a few weeks, rather than months like in the past They did such a good job as soon as the scars had healed I was able to go swimming again.

[cheddar-caveman]

My recent experiences of the NHS down here, Someset, have been mixed. From my local clinic, excellent but when I had to be an in patient at the hospital, bloody awful, in fact I signed myself out after a few days, it was so bad.

Anyway, I think one of the main problems these days is, like with education, is the continual changing of the basic ideas of the system. Until fairly recently nurses trained "hands on" in a hospital, starting at the bottom and "working" their way up. Yes they cleaned the wards, emptied pans etc etc but at the same time had hands on experience alongside their more experienced counterparts. All their training was "hands on". Today they don't even see a ward until they have a "degree"! Now hospitals have to employ a whole new group of staff to do the cleaning, emptying etc and therefore their wage bills have multiplied probably three fold without actually contributing to patient care.

Go back to the old ways here, as with education. Train our nurses hands on, on the wards. Go back to Sisters/matron running the hospitals, not financial gurus, that way every level of staffing are trained/training nurses.

By the way, I have seen it, and still see it from the inside as my father was a doctor/surgeon, my mother and sister nurses and I now work as a First Responder with the ambulance service

[John]

The NHS works to the dictate of this Government.

They are always changing that dictate.

Part of their governance is to confuse making it difficult for the observer to be able to make informed comment.

There is such an imbalance between areas, postcode treatment availability and service.

The word 'National' should be removed.

Well perhaps not, because that would cost millions of pounds, loads more of pointless meetings plus lunches to change.

[Elder Rebel]

I have read all the messages and there is factual truth in them all but a lack of 'what to do advice'.  I am a Non Executive Director of my local Primary Care Trust for one main reason.  That reason is that there is much good in the NHS and much that needs to be improved and put right.

We have recently reduced our management staff by 10% and created more nurse positions in the community. We may not have done enough, but it is a start.  Much of the waste in the NHS ic created by the Dept of Health who dream up crazy schemes which are forced on Hospitals and PCT's.  They also hire expensive 'Consultants' from America to help with some of these schemes.  A favourite scheme at present is called World Class Commissioning which is supported by a group called Premier Inc who are being paid millions to advise.  This scheme will achieve little but is consuming vast amounts of management time in PCT's which is also costing further millions and diverting effort from actual day to day management of the NHS.

So the problems are not just waste of pencils and paper.  One thing that we can all do, is go to local Primary Care Trust board meetings and raise a ruction.  These are meetings held in public where the public do not have a legal right to speak but can observe and can raise questions by prior notice.  Most PCT Chairs will go further and allow public presentations and accept petitions.  Also having observed a meeting you have every right to write to the Chair, Chief Exec etc afterwards to query what was said or present another piece of information.  Remember the PCT controls the purse strings for your community and is also responsible for the performance of the local hospital.  So in Stafford much of the blame for what went wrong should be directed towards the directors of the local PCT.  It is not just a hospital problem.

I could go on and on but I am sure you have the gist now.  Don't expect your local NHS to get it right for you.  They sometimes fail. Go and take an interest and make sure your voice is heard..

[cheddar-caveman]

Many thanks Elder Rebel for taking the time to post a most interesting reply for us. I have to say that I for one was not aware that we could "participate" in the trust meetings and will endeavour to do so next time.

I still think that the old method of training hospital nursing staff is hands on, on the wards made far better nurses than today's method of them spending most of their training at a university. They don't see and therefore cannot react to real life situations so when they do eventually get onto a ward they are ill prepared.

[Hells Granny]

Cheddar Caveman,

you are so right about Nurse training. It used to be an apprenticeship, hands on and straight into the mucky stuff. Many of today's college and Uni trained nurses don't have the practical skills at the bedside, as they aren't 'hands on'. They don't have clue 1 how to move a patient without causing pain, hygeine is less than adequate on wards with patients often not being washed for days, and very rarely is anyone helped to feed themselves.

The Nursing Council (whatever it calls itself now) abolished a complete grade of qualified Nurses (I was one of them!), the practical Nurses, called SEN's. We were the qualified Bedside carers, we helped the Students learn the hands on stuff, while the SRN's were managing care plans, and deciding on the care to be given.

Whilst on the subject, do you folk know that the Patient Care Clinics being set up are a rip off? they get a certain amount of funding, and are semi-private. They can cherry-pick the easy and cheap treatments, leaving the NHS with the expensive and difficult stuff. And if you are a patient in one of them and an emergency crops up, guess what happens? You get sent to the local NHS hospital, because these clinics do not have Emergency facilities or 24 hour cover.

the BMA are not happy at all about these Clinics.

Cheers, HG

[John]

It is normally the same Doctors in both the Private and NHS.

How Doctors can work so many hours for the sake of grabbing as much as they can,
on top of the NHS £100,000 pa is amazing.

If they were pilots there would be a public outcry.

You know those Doctors who confuse the drug dosage - they can't all be wide awake...