Hospital limits number of patients seen in A & E

Hospital limits number of patients seen in A & E

From BBC News:

“The number of patients admitted to an east London hospital A&E unit is to be capped at busy times to improve care.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) said the A&E department at Queen’s Hospital, Romford, was providing patients with “unacceptably poor care”.

It comes after inspectors found some A&E patients had to wait up to 11 hours before being transferred to a ward.”

This appalling decision is the result of so many patients visiting Accident and Emergency Departments and while this decision has been made by a hospital in Romford, it could apply to any hospital within the UK.

There have been many calls for patients to visit their own GPs rather than attending hospital but still patients pour into A&E departments in their droves. Why?

One reason must be that the out of hours GP service is so derisory. Patients are visited by doctors who speak little English or who just do not care. I have had the misfortune of needing to call the out-of-hours service on a Friday evening only to be told that I should see my GP on Monday. The next day I collapsed, an ambulance took me straight to hospital and surgeons performed an operation on the Sunday. My family could have saved me time and much agony by calling for an ambulance in the first instance.

It seems that some practising GPs sign on as out-of-hours locums because they can gain a significant amount of extra pay. I know of one GP who chose to give up his practice because he could take home more as an out-of-hours locum. Now, GPs are hardly paid a pittance; they are highly paid yet do no work at nights or at weekends, unless they have signed up for an out-of-hours service.

Sure, doctors train for many years and are expected to make life and death decisions but in my experience UK doctors can miss simple diagnoses that American doctors dare not because they would be sued for millions of dollars. Yet in the UK, the government is continually attempting to further restrict compensation payments rather than improve patient care.

The result of this incompetence on the part of successive governments is that hospital A&E departments are bearing the brunt and will be further forced to restrict the numbers of patients seen. Somehow, I cannot imagine Margaret Thatcher allowing a situation like this to continue. Much as I disliked Thatcher’s policies, she handbagged doctors and forced them to ensure the service to patients improved considerably. It has since deteriorated badly. We no longer have any politicians capable of performing a similar feat. Conviction politics has died and we are left with mediocre tinkerers. And we are all the poorer for it.

Damian Green and police assaults

I must admit that I am not a great supporter of the Conservative Party, or of conservative ideology in general. I am, however, somewhat bemused by the recent heavy-handed tactics of the police in raiding Damian Green’s homes and office. There must, surely, have been a less obtrusive way of investigating the allegations against Mr Green?

Members of Parliament have a respected position within society. That being so, they should be respected when an investigation is being conducted by the police. That is not to say that MPs are beyond the law. Far from it. What if the information being gleaned by an MP was being passed to an organisation linked to terrorism? Far-fetched? Maybe, but still possible and that is why any allegations must be investigated. But heavy-handed investigations of the type carried out against Mr Green, and because of their nature they will be widely reported, must bring the role, honesty and trustworthiness of Parliament itself into disrepute. And bringing Parliament into disrepute will bring democracy into disrepute. The police should have kept this in mind when investigating the allegations against Mr Green. I remember a saying I read in a children’s comic many years ago: Softly, softly, catchee monkee. No, to go barging in in the way the police did only brings the integrity of the police into disrepute.

It is not only the Damien Green incident that has brought the police into disrepute. The Sunday Mirror has reported an attack by three police officers on a veteran of the Afghanistan Campaign, Lance Corporal Mark Aspinall. At first, Mr Aspinall was found guilty by magistrates of attacking the police. Luckily, however, the truth was captured on CCTV, which showed that the policemen most brutally attacked Aspinall. After seeing the video, a Crown Court judge quashed the conviction on appeal after seeing the CCTV footage. This cannot be enough. Action must be taken against the police officers involved. If such brutality can be waged against Mark Aspinall, an innocent man, how are we to believe that the police acted within the rules of engagement during the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes?

Everyone should view the Mirror article and view the video embedded in the page:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/11/29/brute-force-three-police-officers-beat-up-handcuffed-iraq-war-veteran-115875-20934568/

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