 | The NHS - look beyond the headlines |
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| Posted By : Bill On 04/02/2018 14:45:00 | |
| There were two headlines in the paper this week which, taken together, infuriated me: “NHS forced to pay £1,500 for £2 pot of moisturiser” and “Compensation payouts ‘could bankrupt NHS’”. The first one sounds like bad management; how else do you pay £1,500 for a £2 item? Is it a badly drawn contract, or a person responsible for purchasing who failed to see, and solve, the problem. The second one is the usual NHS spin (they must spend a lot on public relations). Big claims which succeed (and the ones that fail don’t affect the NHS) do so because the staff have been negligent. They keep on being negligent, and have done for the last 25 years at least. Proper training would prevent a lot of the claims I see – simple bad management of the birth process, leading to a child born with cerebral palsy. Taken together, the headlines suggest that the NHS don’t train anyone; either the medical staff or the purchasing officers. Of course, behind those headlines, but I think obscured by them, is the fact that the NHS provides some wonderful care to a lot of us; many people have a story about how well they have been looked after. | |
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