david_chisnall on Nostr: nprofile1q…s60lz I spent almost three weeks recently in an NHS hospital (as a ...
nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqg0tuf634rz4suczwj7kgnecr6cyt0eu9xmp3sp0fku68mqehq4msas60lz (nprofile…60lz) I spent almost three weeks recently in an NHS hospital (as a visitor) and the processes are staggeringly inefficient. If someone spent ten minutes listening to the top things nurses complain about then they could make huge improvements. A few examples:
Several people waited over five hours to be discharged because the processes for getting drugs from the hospital pharmacy for them to take home made no sense. One person was there over 14 hours after being told he could go home. Eventually a nurse grabbed a doctor and stood over him while he wrote the prescription and then persuaded a porter to run over to the pharmacy to collect it. These people are taking up beds and leaving queues.
A&E is overwhelmed because no one can get a GP appointment and, especially, because GPs don’t do house calls. If you can’t easily get to a GP surgery, A&E is your only option because they at least will collect you in an ambulance (it may take several hours and then more waiting). Nurses in electric bicycles (or small cars) visiting people in their homes for triage, with a video linkup to a nationwide bank of specialists (so the nurses can prod people and relay things to the person doing an initial diagnosis) would reduce A&E attendance by at least 30% and would probably reduce it more because a lot of things are simpler if treated even a couple of days earlier, but people don’t want to go to A&E except as a last resort.
Doctors are impossible to reach. The system for connecting to a specialist is different at weekends. They use an instant messaging system, but there’s no time in the schedule for doctors to actually check things so messages that need a 30 second reply take hours. Part of this is because you can get the messages only by logging into a desktop. Give doctors a handheld thing to check these quickly while moving between wards and you’d improve life a lot.
The hospital buildings are outsourced. The lifts in the one I was visiting have been broken for months because the contractor that installed the lifts had gone bankrupt and the landlords and tenant (the NHS) were arguing about whose liability it was. If the NHS owned the building, this would not be an issue. It’s not like they gain value from paying a load of rent: they are going to be the sole tenant for as long as the building exists, this is just siphoning public money.
Oh, and there’s a special place in hell for whoever decided that hospitals could count reclining chairs as beds in their statistics. I hope they have an operation with severe complications and have to spend a month in a reclining chair instead of a real bed.
A half-decent management consultant could find hundreds of improvements if they actually did their job. The ones employed so far have all been of negative value and should be stripped of any accreditation that they may have and their employers should be banned from public contracts for the next decade.
Several people waited over five hours to be discharged because the processes for getting drugs from the hospital pharmacy for them to take home made no sense. One person was there over 14 hours after being told he could go home. Eventually a nurse grabbed a doctor and stood over him while he wrote the prescription and then persuaded a porter to run over to the pharmacy to collect it. These people are taking up beds and leaving queues.
A&E is overwhelmed because no one can get a GP appointment and, especially, because GPs don’t do house calls. If you can’t easily get to a GP surgery, A&E is your only option because they at least will collect you in an ambulance (it may take several hours and then more waiting). Nurses in electric bicycles (or small cars) visiting people in their homes for triage, with a video linkup to a nationwide bank of specialists (so the nurses can prod people and relay things to the person doing an initial diagnosis) would reduce A&E attendance by at least 30% and would probably reduce it more because a lot of things are simpler if treated even a couple of days earlier, but people don’t want to go to A&E except as a last resort.
Doctors are impossible to reach. The system for connecting to a specialist is different at weekends. They use an instant messaging system, but there’s no time in the schedule for doctors to actually check things so messages that need a 30 second reply take hours. Part of this is because you can get the messages only by logging into a desktop. Give doctors a handheld thing to check these quickly while moving between wards and you’d improve life a lot.
The hospital buildings are outsourced. The lifts in the one I was visiting have been broken for months because the contractor that installed the lifts had gone bankrupt and the landlords and tenant (the NHS) were arguing about whose liability it was. If the NHS owned the building, this would not be an issue. It’s not like they gain value from paying a load of rent: they are going to be the sole tenant for as long as the building exists, this is just siphoning public money.
Oh, and there’s a special place in hell for whoever decided that hospitals could count reclining chairs as beds in their statistics. I hope they have an operation with severe complications and have to spend a month in a reclining chair instead of a real bed.
A half-decent management consultant could find hundreds of improvements if they actually did their job. The ones employed so far have all been of negative value and should be stripped of any accreditation that they may have and their employers should be banned from public contracts for the next decade.