How Britain is Controlling Health Care Costs
Patients are routinely wheeled into closets that double as “treatment rooms.” Some miss meals and others can’t sleep. The administrative inefficiencies that make this happen include insufficient beds, improper staffing, burdensome paper work and the artificial wait time targets imposed on the hospitals by the government.
Britain only spends around six percent of its GDP on health care. This doesn’t sound too implausible when you consider the NHS uses closets that double as treatment rooms and older, less advanced cancer therapies. Do patients also convalesce in huge, open wards of the type that Charles Dickens would recognize?
Considering that the NHS is a role model for current US health care reform proposals, the story doesn’t seem to be getting much attention here.
Just as family members discuss funeral/burial plans in advance of need, it is also very important to discuss preferences for end of life care. If a DNR order (Do Not Resuscitate) is in a terminal patient’s record, it can alleviate a great deal of the family’s anxiety as well as unnecessary pain for the patient.
President Obama is asking me to give up my consumer-driven plan where I make the choices about when and how to spend my health care dollars and doctors are accountable to me, and trade that for a system that will inflict higher costs, less care, longer waits, and the government will put me in jail if I don’t buy one of its one-size-fits-all policies. No thanks, I prefer the status quo.
ObamaCare is not about creature conforts. The question is: do people live just as long in closets as they do in private rooms. If the do, then the closet is the cost effective choice.
Devon, you are actually correct about the large open wards.
My ward is a 30 bed “Nightingale” ward. There are 12 beds lined up in a row down the left side of the ward and 14 beds lined up in a row down the right side. Then we have 2 siderooms for isolation of infected patients. There is barely any space between the beds. Infection control problems are blamed on the front line nurses who are forced to take on way more patients than they can handle.
The patients all share one bathroom. We have two commodes (portable toilets on wheels) for the entire 30 bed ward. 99% of the patients are immobile and cannot walk to the bathroom and line up to wait for it. So we depend on the two commodes. Most patients need two members of staff to lift them onto the commode. The staff is always outnumbered, at every moment, by patients crying out for assistance with toileting. They curse the front line staff and decry them as lazy.
Our ward is often staffed with only 3 or 4 staff. Two of them are nurses and two of them are assistants.
Many patients are complaining about the lack of dignity and privacy on these wards. They complain that staff “won’t bother” to help them to the toilet and accuse the staff of leaving people to lie in their own filth. People do get left to lie in their own filth, but it is only because it is taking the staff 6 hours to get around to everyone just once.
The socialist NHS overlords are appointing more highly paid beaurocrats to “solve” the problem by “teaching” the nurses how to “maintain” patient dignity and be more “compassionate”. But they won’t hire more nurses and they won’t pay the ones they do have. This helps them lose frontline staff to what they term “natural wastage”. Then they can hire more worthless beaurocrats and put what money they have into more worthless government initiatives. They won’t modernise our ward or buy new commodes.
I spent too many years in the United States, that is how I can see through their socialist BS.
Militant Medical Nurse.