Health Direct praises NHS workers' blogs as thousands of NHS staff protest over job cuts
In respect to the national day of action on Saturday that was called in support of the NHS and to protest against cuts in both patient care and staff jobs, Health Direct praises four blogs written by NHS staff. Random Acts Of Reality by Tom Reynolds an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service; NHS Blog Doctor by Dr John Crippen, Life in the NHS by Julie and Nee Naw by Mark Myers.
Thousands of health workers have been holding marches and rallies to protest about cuts to NHS jobs and services, and below-inflation pay increases.
Demonstrations took place in a number of towns and cities, including London, Manchester, Preston, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Belfast. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber - who spoke in Sheffield - said there was "real concern" about NHS policies. The events were co-ordinated by NHS Together, an alliance of unions and NHS staff organisations.
Random Acts Of Reality, a Blog based in London, England, written by an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service. Also, number one search result for "Womble porn". All names have be changed to protect the guilty. This Blog was previously known as "Why I Hate Humanity" but the antipsychotic medication seems to have kicked in.
Pay 'Rise'
by Tom Reynolds on Thu 01 Mar 2007 06:19 PM GMT
Expletive Deleted.
Isn't it nice to be valued by the government? Pay rises below the rate of inflation which are also staggered which effectively means that my standard of living is set to go down.
Crap conditions, increasing demands, moronic running of the NHS and increased expectations with no increase of resources. Lies from the government who took money away from the ambulance service that made it's (worthless) targets.
A screwing over of our new members of staff giving them barely liveable wages for years. An expectation to work harder, an expectation to increase our scope of practice and all this leading to increased danger to staff.
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/3/1/2773493.html
Dr John Crippen's diary The trials and tribulations, the pleasures and pitfalls of family medicine in the modern British National Health Service.
Dr Crippen is angry. He has worked for over 20 years in the NHS. He watches and weeps as the Health Service, slowly but inexorably, is destroyed.
He takes a sad, sometimes humorous, sometimes cynical, look at the health care from the inside
http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/
The more I listen to Patricia Hewitt, and her health care "truths", the more I feel trapped in an Orwellian vision of the future.
A horrifying report from yesterday's Independent on Sunday.
Record numbers of women are being harmed or dying as a direct result of childbirth in what doctors are labelling as “a crisis” in maternity care.
* 391 women have died in childbirth in the last three years, a 21% increase on the previous comparable period.
* The UK now has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Europe, with 13 deaths per 100,000.
* 17676 women have suffered physical harm on labour wards in the last three years – harm such as perforated bowels, necessitation temporary colostomies.
* Maternity medical negligence claims are costing the NHS £1 billion a year
It is all due to lack of resources and, as Dr Crippen never tires of saying, dumbing down.
* Midwives are doing work for which they are not trained; work that should be done by doctors.
* Health care assistants are doing work for which they are not trained; work that should be done my midwives.
How is the government dealing with this?
The Independent quotes the Department of Health as saying:
“Giving birth is safer than it has ever been.”
Patricia Hewitt said last year that the NHS had had its “best year ever”. This year, she has promised to “balance the books”; to get the NHS finances out of deficit.
"I'm not planning on failure"
In typical fashion, Ms Hewitt last year declared that she would "take personal responsibility" if she failed to balance the NHS books by this April, the end of the financial year.
Think about that last statement. She says she will "take personal responsibility". She is the Secretary of State for Health. She is responsible for the NHS.
And precisely how is she going to balance the books?
by closing maternity units
by sacking young hospital doctors who are training in obstetrics
by sacking midwives
How many more deaths do there have to be before Paricia Hewitt is sacked?
Life in the NHS Julie has been a nurse for more than 25 years (yes really), and for the last 5 have managed a training and education department of a Primary Care Trust in the United Kingdom.
Married, have a teenage son and am also studying for a post graduate degree. Not surprisingly I am sometimes unsure of my own sanity!
I was amused to hear that the government is now suggesting round the clock surgery to clear waiting times. The very idea of getting your routine hernia repair, or hip replacement at midnight sounds bizarre beyond belief.
We have PCTs who are bankrupt telling NHS Trusts not to operate on their patients before April and suddenly it is a good idea to operate in the dead of night. How much would it cost your average cash strapped hospital to run services in this way, and how many doctors would be left to cover the day time hours?
Puts a new perspective on ‘day’ cases which would be come ‘night’ ones and if the hospital was in London would save money for all by avoiding congestion charges! Maybe the idea has mileage after-all?
February 19th, 2007
http://lifeinthenhs.wordpress.com/tag/news-and-current-affairs-general/
Nee Naw - Blog by Mark Myers a Dispatcher in the London Ambulance Service's Control Room
About This Blog
If you were to walk into London Ambulance’s control room and peer down into the call taking area (otherwise known as “the pit”), you might see a young green-clad man ferociously scribbling notes on the back of a rejected annual leave slip between calls.
That man is me, and those notes form the basis of this blog. Since I started work in Central Ambulance Control (or Nee Naw Control, as it shall henceforth be known), I have kept a diary my most memorable calls, from delivering babies in pub toilets to soothing hungover teenagers, via the inevitable embarrassing sexual accident.
I have now decided that the time has come to release that diary on to the Internet for public consumption.
Weeding Out The Snifflers
Posted in Ambulances by Mark Myers on the February 13th, 2007
When it gets busy, the dispatch desks spend a lot of time calling back our lower priority calls “apologising” for delays and hoping that the callers will get the message that they shouldn’t be calling us and should be calling a GP/taxi/etc instead.
We are not allowed to refuse people an ambulance but we are allowed to warn them of long delays and generally coax them into deciding to cancel and deal with the problem more appropriately. We are on rather shaky ground doing this, but since the Telephone Advice people stopped using TAS and started using a new system called PSIAM we have no option.
Gone are the days of the No Send Policy — using PSIAM, Telephone Advice are forced to make us send out ambulances for any person who insists on one. As you can tell, I am not a fan. I fear for us dispatchers, because one day, in an effort to weed out an inappropriate call, we are going end up coaxing someone who is seriously ill but mistriaged as low priority to make their own way to hospital, and the papers will get hold of it, and all hell will break lose.
It shouldn’t fall on us to do this; Telephone Advice should be given their old system back, which worked perfectly well in getting rid of the time wasters and identifying the seriously ill people who had erroneously been triaged as low priority.
Anyway, despite these worries, I felt reasonably confident in calling back a thirty-year old man whose symptoms were given as “runny nose, cough, slight fever, headache, for two days”.
“Hello sir,” I began. “This is the London Ambulance Service here. I’m ringing to apologise for the delay. All our vehicles are busy dealing with other emergencies” (I emphasised the word “emergencies”.) “How are you feeling?”
“I have a cold!” grumbled the man, as if that much had not been obvious.
“I see,” I said. “And has anything changed since you called? Have you done anything for your… cold?”
“No!” said the man. “Nothing has changed, and I have had it for TWO DAYS! I went to the hospital yesterday, and they did NOTHING! They told me to take paracetamol and sent me home. They were not able to cure me!”
“Well, sir,” I said. “That’s the thing about the common cold — there is no cure. If you’re sure that’s what it is, then you just have to wait for it to go away.”
The man tsked and muttered something about the state of the NHS, and then cancelled the ambulance, which was good, because we needed five vehicles for an 80mph RTA on a 30mph road, and wouldn’t have had one for him for hours.
I think a lot of our inappropriate callers share the underlying beliefs of this caller, which is that if you are ill or injured and feeling lousy, you shouldn’t have to put up with it, and that someone from the medical profession will always be able to come along and wave a magic wand, which will make you feel better.
It just doesn’t occur to people to go to bed and take some time out and wait for whatever is wrong with them to go away. Everything has to be fixed instantly, and if it can’t be, it is always someone’s fault.
Thousands of health workers have been holding marches and rallies to protest about cuts to NHS jobs and services, and below-inflation pay increases.
Demonstrations took place in a number of towns and cities, including London, Manchester, Preston, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Belfast. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber - who spoke in Sheffield - said there was "real concern" about NHS policies. The events were co-ordinated by NHS Together, an alliance of unions and NHS staff organisations.
Random Acts Of Reality, a Blog based in London, England, written by an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service. Also, number one search result for "Womble porn". All names have be changed to protect the guilty. This Blog was previously known as "Why I Hate Humanity" but the antipsychotic medication seems to have kicked in.
Pay 'Rise'
by Tom Reynolds on Thu 01 Mar 2007 06:19 PM GMT
Expletive Deleted.
Isn't it nice to be valued by the government? Pay rises below the rate of inflation which are also staggered which effectively means that my standard of living is set to go down.
Crap conditions, increasing demands, moronic running of the NHS and increased expectations with no increase of resources. Lies from the government who took money away from the ambulance service that made it's (worthless) targets.
A screwing over of our new members of staff giving them barely liveable wages for years. An expectation to work harder, an expectation to increase our scope of practice and all this leading to increased danger to staff.
http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/3/1/2773493.html
Dr John Crippen's diary The trials and tribulations, the pleasures and pitfalls of family medicine in the modern British National Health Service.
Dr Crippen is angry. He has worked for over 20 years in the NHS. He watches and weeps as the Health Service, slowly but inexorably, is destroyed.
He takes a sad, sometimes humorous, sometimes cynical, look at the health care from the inside
http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/
The more I listen to Patricia Hewitt, and her health care "truths", the more I feel trapped in an Orwellian vision of the future.
A horrifying report from yesterday's Independent on Sunday.Record numbers of women are being harmed or dying as a direct result of childbirth in what doctors are labelling as “a crisis” in maternity care.
* 391 women have died in childbirth in the last three years, a 21% increase on the previous comparable period.
* The UK now has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Europe, with 13 deaths per 100,000.
* 17676 women have suffered physical harm on labour wards in the last three years – harm such as perforated bowels, necessitation temporary colostomies.
* Maternity medical negligence claims are costing the NHS £1 billion a year
It is all due to lack of resources and, as Dr Crippen never tires of saying, dumbing down.
* Midwives are doing work for which they are not trained; work that should be done by doctors.
* Health care assistants are doing work for which they are not trained; work that should be done my midwives.
How is the government dealing with this?
The Independent quotes the Department of Health as saying:
“Giving birth is safer than it has ever been.”
Patricia Hewitt said last year that the NHS had had its “best year ever”. This year, she has promised to “balance the books”; to get the NHS finances out of deficit.
"I'm not planning on failure"
In typical fashion, Ms Hewitt last year declared that she would "take personal responsibility" if she failed to balance the NHS books by this April, the end of the financial year.
Think about that last statement. She says she will "take personal responsibility". She is the Secretary of State for Health. She is responsible for the NHS.
And precisely how is she going to balance the books?
by closing maternity units
by sacking young hospital doctors who are training in obstetrics
by sacking midwives
How many more deaths do there have to be before Paricia Hewitt is sacked?
Life in the NHS Julie has been a nurse for more than 25 years (yes really), and for the last 5 have managed a training and education department of a Primary Care Trust in the United Kingdom.
Married, have a teenage son and am also studying for a post graduate degree. Not surprisingly I am sometimes unsure of my own sanity!
I was amused to hear that the government is now suggesting round the clock surgery to clear waiting times. The very idea of getting your routine hernia repair, or hip replacement at midnight sounds bizarre beyond belief.
We have PCTs who are bankrupt telling NHS Trusts not to operate on their patients before April and suddenly it is a good idea to operate in the dead of night. How much would it cost your average cash strapped hospital to run services in this way, and how many doctors would be left to cover the day time hours?
Puts a new perspective on ‘day’ cases which would be come ‘night’ ones and if the hospital was in London would save money for all by avoiding congestion charges! Maybe the idea has mileage after-all?
February 19th, 2007
http://lifeinthenhs.wordpress.com/tag/news-and-current-affairs-general/
Nee Naw - Blog by Mark Myers a Dispatcher in the London Ambulance Service's Control Room
About This Blog
If you were to walk into London Ambulance’s control room and peer down into the call taking area (otherwise known as “the pit”), you might see a young green-clad man ferociously scribbling notes on the back of a rejected annual leave slip between calls.
That man is me, and those notes form the basis of this blog. Since I started work in Central Ambulance Control (or Nee Naw Control, as it shall henceforth be known), I have kept a diary my most memorable calls, from delivering babies in pub toilets to soothing hungover teenagers, via the inevitable embarrassing sexual accident.
I have now decided that the time has come to release that diary on to the Internet for public consumption.
Weeding Out The Snifflers
Posted in Ambulances by Mark Myers on the February 13th, 2007
When it gets busy, the dispatch desks spend a lot of time calling back our lower priority calls “apologising” for delays and hoping that the callers will get the message that they shouldn’t be calling us and should be calling a GP/taxi/etc instead.
We are not allowed to refuse people an ambulance but we are allowed to warn them of long delays and generally coax them into deciding to cancel and deal with the problem more appropriately. We are on rather shaky ground doing this, but since the Telephone Advice people stopped using TAS and started using a new system called PSIAM we have no option.
Gone are the days of the No Send Policy — using PSIAM, Telephone Advice are forced to make us send out ambulances for any person who insists on one. As you can tell, I am not a fan. I fear for us dispatchers, because one day, in an effort to weed out an inappropriate call, we are going end up coaxing someone who is seriously ill but mistriaged as low priority to make their own way to hospital, and the papers will get hold of it, and all hell will break lose.
It shouldn’t fall on us to do this; Telephone Advice should be given their old system back, which worked perfectly well in getting rid of the time wasters and identifying the seriously ill people who had erroneously been triaged as low priority.
Anyway, despite these worries, I felt reasonably confident in calling back a thirty-year old man whose symptoms were given as “runny nose, cough, slight fever, headache, for two days”.
“Hello sir,” I began. “This is the London Ambulance Service here. I’m ringing to apologise for the delay. All our vehicles are busy dealing with other emergencies” (I emphasised the word “emergencies”.) “How are you feeling?”
“I have a cold!” grumbled the man, as if that much had not been obvious.
“I see,” I said. “And has anything changed since you called? Have you done anything for your… cold?”
“No!” said the man. “Nothing has changed, and I have had it for TWO DAYS! I went to the hospital yesterday, and they did NOTHING! They told me to take paracetamol and sent me home. They were not able to cure me!”
“Well, sir,” I said. “That’s the thing about the common cold — there is no cure. If you’re sure that’s what it is, then you just have to wait for it to go away.”
The man tsked and muttered something about the state of the NHS, and then cancelled the ambulance, which was good, because we needed five vehicles for an 80mph RTA on a 30mph road, and wouldn’t have had one for him for hours.
I think a lot of our inappropriate callers share the underlying beliefs of this caller, which is that if you are ill or injured and feeling lousy, you shouldn’t have to put up with it, and that someone from the medical profession will always be able to come along and wave a magic wand, which will make you feel better.
It just doesn’t occur to people to go to bed and take some time out and wait for whatever is wrong with them to go away. Everything has to be fixed instantly, and if it can’t be, it is always someone’s fault.
Labels: blogs, NHS, Patricia Hewitt
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