NHS errors costing billions a year - Jeremy Hunt

[Northerner]

Basic mistakes in hospitals in England cost the NHS up to £2.5bn a year, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is to say.

And the NHS could afford to hire more nurses if the errors were cut out, Mr Hunt will claim during a speech in Birmingham on Thursday.

Cost is incurred through problems like medication errors, avoidable infections after surgery, and litigation.

But a spokesman for the Royal College of Nursing said mistakes were the result of understaffed wards.

In his speech Mr Hunt will describe these kind of mistakes as "expensive and wasteful" at a time when hospital trusts are trying to save money.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29639383

More blame-game from Hunt

 

[Andy HB]

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with what was said. The difficulty is in how you reduce those mistakes (because they do occur and for many different reasons).

My wife used to work for the NHS as a trainee radiographer. Some of the things she saw going on makes my toes curl. In her experience, staff cut corners, management of the department was very poor, bullying was a major problem and there was rampant nepotism in terms of recruitment.

The NHS is a good thing, but it isn't perfect. It needs really high quality management from the top to really lick it into shape. At the moment, that simply does not exist (but there are no doubt some areas of it which do have good management .... perhaps that is the starting point of making improvements throughout).

 

[Northerner]

The NHS is a good thing, but it isn't perfect. It needs really high quality management from the top to really lick it into shape. At the moment, that simply does not exist (but there are no doubt some areas of it which do have good management .... perhaps that is the starting point of making improvements throughout).

I think this is always going to be the root of the problem - the quality of the staff and management. Although not the NHS I have worked with hundreds of managers, including Director level, and a great number of them left a lot to be desired. Such people were good at talking the talk, but in terms of their knowledge of the actual shop-floor and how things actually worked they were decidedly bereft

The NHS is a massive organisation and you simply cannot expect that, however hard you try, everyone will be absolutely on their game at all times. The problem is that when things go wrong they affect people's health and lives. We know ourselves that the quality of diabetes care varies hugely up and down the country, often due to their lack of knowledge or skill, or ability to move with the times.

I'm not excusing the mistakes, just saying that it is unreasonable to expect that everyone working for the NHS will be premium quality. Even if they are then external factors can frustrate their efforts, such as understaffing or increased demand for services. This is also why the government's refusal to implement the measly below-inflation pay rise is so wrong, because it is demoralising an already demoralised workforce, and most likely reducing the likelihood that the top-quality people will be attracted into working for the NHS in the future. Contrast the way public service staff are being treated with the so-called 'captains of industry' or bankers - the government is constantly trying to sweeten the pill for them, afraid that they might go elsewhere (despite the fact that so many of them have been exposed as greedy fraudsters). Oops! Rant over 😉