For a doctor, the Tories’ empty promises on hospitals are soul-destroying

[Northerner]

In my first year as a doctor, I witnessed the fetid reality of crumbling NHS real estate. Arriving at work one morning on the emergency assessment unit – the frenetic hub through which most of the hospital’s acutely unwell patients passed – I discovered it had ground to a malodorous halt. Men in hard hats were shouting orders to nurses, porters were evacuating patients on trolleys. I was told a main waste pipe on the floor above had ruptured, with predictably rancid and unhygienic consequences. So much for being an NHS teaching hospital of global renown: we were literally awash with slurry.

I was reminded of these unsavoury events by Sajid Javid, who tweeted last week: “Looking forward to opening one of new 48 hospitals [sic] later today.” Imagine bragging about building all those new hospitals when the existing ones are so rundown and dilapidated, they can’t even contain their human excrement.

Javid’s tweet met with a chorus of derision. The fact was, the health secretary was not en route to a “new” hospital at all, but rather to a new cancer unit, built within the existing Cumberland Infirmary in Cumbria, which was itself opened in 2000 – by the then prime minister, Tony Blair. As Siva Anandaciva, chief policy analyst at health think tank the King’s Fund, puts it, the phrase new hospital “might suggest the NHS will see its stock of hospitals grow with … brand new, fully staffed hospitals that offer a full range of services. But – in reality – the promised investment is likely to pay for new facilities on existing hospital sites and the redeployment of existing staff.”

For a doctor, the Tories’ empty promises on hospitals are soul-destroying | Rachel Clarke

NHS staff are being taken for fools, says palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke

www.theguardian.com

Whilst it is clear that the government are not afraid to lie, the blame must also be laid at the door of the media who do not call out the lies every time they are repeated, only then will the truth cut through

 

[trophywench]

Mmmmm - they have been building a new hospital just outside the centre of Brum for a number of years now, not assisted by Carillion going bust suddenly. Only thing is - it's Dudley Road hospital much of which was still in the original brick built Victorian buildings. In the early 1990s courtesy of the firm for whom I worked sending all employees attaining 40 for a private healthcare full health workover art of which included the full female screening the gynae who saw me worked at the private hospital part time whilst her NHS practice was at Dudley Road, apologised profusely for the speculum being freezing cold, saying 'In the winter at Dudley Road, the gynae nurses having retrieved the sterilised instruments from the autoclave, automatically place the metal kidney dish with them in on top of the radiator in the consulting room to keep warm before they are used - no such refinements in private practice here!'

Anyway, no doubt there will be much whooping and squawking in the paper when it opens for business ....

 

[mikeyB]

Shouldn’t worry, Boris promised forty new hospitals. Didn’t say how we were going to find all the staff, mind.

But then it was all a lie, anyway. Now due to all his other lies about Brexit, most of the EU doctors working here are all off home, or planning to, and who can blame them. Many of the Asian docs I used to work with have probably been sent ‘home’ by first generation immigrant Pritti Patel.

No need to worry, though. There’ll be lots of students will be clamouring for medical jobs, but the trouble with that is there aren’t enough hospital training placements for them. The government hasn’t thought that through, obviously thinking that medical students spring forth from Uni fully equipped with the knowledge to work unsupervised, when actually they know bugger all about the nitty gritty of medical life on call.