Why Joy Harper, a senior orthopaedic nurse, left the NHS last year:
The moment I knew I had to leave the NHS came when I spoke to a very dignified old man who had spent three days lying in a bed with a fractured hip. He was a war veteran in his 80s and his operation had been cancelled twice. He'd been lying there quietly, getting some pain relief, but otherwise unnoticed by the rest of the medical staff because they were too busy tryng to cope with the rest of the ward.I was taking his temperature when he turned to me and said quietly, uncomplainingly: "I had been wanted to go to my veterans' day in Arnhem, but I suppose I will miss that now."
Something inside me snapped and I knew I couldn't carry on working in a system that was no longer helping such a man. The war vereran waited so long for his hip op' that he contracted a chest infection which turned into pneumonia.
He recovered and eventually had the operation.
I went into nursing to help people, but I ended up having to wake a senile old woman with cancer at 11pm to make her move wards because her bed was needed....
I routinely saw operations cancelled, people left on trolleys instead of beds and people who had been waiting over a year for an operation being told there was no room on the theatre list. A lot of cancellations were coverd up by managers, because they wouldn't have hit government targets.
This is from page 38 of the Daily Mail today, alongside the stories of three other nurse who have left the NHS.
One of them, Jodie Gange, 23, has resigned as a junior staff nurse at St Thomas's Hospital, London.
She says:
I wouldn't mind if the job itself was rewarding, but it's not. Basic nursing, which I was trained to do, is being squeezed out by bureaucracy. At the end of each shift, I have to write out a nursing evaluation and patient assessment forms. That can take up to three hours of the shift. It seems as if we have to write down everything we ever do to cover our backs, just in case someone makes a complaint.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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The NHS strikes me as lots of little tragedies played out every day by patients who cannot control what happens to them. We can get a pizza when we want it, but we cannot get the treatment we need when we want it, unless we can pay for it. It is a bit like Tesco saying we will decide which Pizza you will get, and when you get it. We wouldn't stand for it in the high street, so why do we stand for it with the big state monopolies? My father died last year, and the standard of care he received was terrible. Worst of all, when he needed the system to respond to his needs, it didn't. Not only that, my mother couldn't get the system to respond - and she still feels intimidated by the system. No-one is accountable. She can buy a pizza, but couldn't get care for my Father. Time to give some power to the people.
Posted by: Ricky at April 27, 2005 09:58 PM
Ricky,
Your experience is sadly all to familiar. We have got to get Government OUT of Health-Care and move choice to the people. It strikes me that the NHS is a useless monument to Statism that puts bureaucracy first, its employees secind, and the patients last. That's what you can expect when Big Governmentr grabs control of our institutions.
Posted by: David Vance at April 28, 2005 10:22 AM
I believe that the problems swamping the NHS derive from the fact that it is no longer run as a service - it is run as a buisiness. It's staff are treated as general commodities rather than people. In a service which employs "carers" benefit would be gained from a management system which showed the same qualities as it's staff. A service run by accountants only interested in the bottom line is NOT in the interest of the public needing the service. The same public who pay for it.
Posted by: David Reeve at December 7, 2006 11:48 PM
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The NHS is badly managed. I had a minor shoulder injury treated recently, and the actual medical care was good, but before I received it I had several appointments for scans,X Rays and examinations. There was endless confusion about lost notes, appointment times, whereabouts of X Rays from previous visits, about whether X Rays of my right and left shoulder had been mixed up, which doctor I had or hadn't seen on my last visit, etc,etc. The whole procedure was farcical. Thankfully, my problem was a minor one, and I could afford to wait for the eventual treatment, but if I had something seriously wrong I'd be reluctant to use the NHS because it seems so disorganised.
Posted by: simmo at April 26, 2005 02:50 PM