Better Health Care
The report on incompetent nurses continuing to treat patients issued by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (another quango - CHRE) is disturbing. It seems the Nursing Midwifery Council (NMC) are accused of closing investigations prematurely without proper authority. Ordinary people might well wonder what is going on? Surely hospitals employing midwifes or nurses should be able to act promptly and quickly when problems arise in their hospitals with patients properly protected and investigations carried out swiftly with expertise.
It seems not. It can take up yo a year to process investigations. The Department of Health has bared its teeth requires 'improved performance'...
The whole process needs upended and given a good shake. I appreciate in medical cases investigations may need to delve deep, and may require properly conducted testing but taking a year to investigate does not serve the patients or the medical staff, and can only undermine confidence in our hospitals.
The current process is simply not good enough, but can something be done about it? I say yes it can. When there are failures in the standards of care in the NHS many people feel that no one is held to account. Part of the problem is that there are far too many bodies with some responsibility for patient safety. We could have a single regulator responsibility for keeping patients safe so that everyone knows who is responsible.
At the moment if a doctor makes a mistake when carrying out a procedure they are not obliged to tell you what's gone wrong. We could change that immediately by requiring hospitals and staff to be open about mistakes, and required to tell patients if something has gone wrong there and then. We can make it illegal for a local health board to allow a doctor or nurse to work in the UK for the first time without passing robust language and competence tests, which must include reading. We could give patients greater control of their own health records, so they're able to take a more active role in managing their health, and have direct access to their own records, with parents having equal access to their children's records.
Choice in the Health Service is a great idea but people can find it difficult to find reliable information about the services available to them. What meaning is choice if the relevant key information is impossible to track down? Each hospital, or GP surgery, specialist department should be responsible for publish its relevant data about the performance of its services, so that everyone is able to make informed choices about their healthcare; rather than sending it off to quango's where it gets buried, analysed and forgotten amid the piles of reports from other organisations, and whose senior staff may be more concerned car park provision than investigating mistakes they would rather keep quiet about such as why Clostridium Difficule rates have been so high in West Suffolk Hospital. Could it be because staff move without restraint from CDiff wards to other wards without the former 4 day quarantine period? Well maybe when they have the car park sorted they will look into this!
We can make our health care better, and we can reduce the costs of the bureaucracy, with a health service driven by local needs rather than whitehall's dictat.