Story here in the UK Times. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.
An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.
Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.
The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said there could be “no excuses” for the failures and added that the board that presided over the scandal had been replaced. An undisclosed number of doctors and at least one nurse are being investigated by the General Medical Council and Nursing and Midwifery Council.
[…]Some NHS chief executives have received six-figure redundancy packages or moved to other trusts despite poor performance. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive at Mid Staffordshire, received pay rises that took his annual salary to £180,000, while standards at the trust deteriorated.
We need to learn from the experiences of other countries with socialism.
- How government-run health care leads to euthanasia
- NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care
- NHS delays treatment for broken arm for four months and counting
- One in six patients misdiagnosed by NHS
- The deadly consequences of rationing health care
- Health care in Britain: question a doctor and lose your children
- How death panels work in the British health care system
- One million NHS patients receive brutally inadequate health care
- 4000 NHS patients denied hospital beds to give birth to children
- Woman gives birth on pavement after NHS refuses to send an ambulance
- NHS hospitals infested with a dozen varieties of vermin
- 39-year old woman is prescribed painkillers and dies after 11-minute NHS exam
- UK National Health Service refuses to pay for lower-back painkillers
WINTERY KNIGHT 