Hell in Staffordshire

I am not the least bit surprised. I have seen the effects that targets have on patient care FIRST HAND.

They admit too many patients for the staffing levels to cope with and then everyone acts all surprised when people suffer and die. I have been overwhelmed and tried to refuse admissions to my ward. They came anyway. They dump them anywhere. The make us wake stable patients up at 4AM to move beds so that they can admit an acute patient from a&e onto my ward. Targets might get breached otherwise!!! Bastards.

Listen. Staffordshire is not the only place where this stuff is happening.

Read this excerpt:

A hospital's "appalling" emergency care resulted in patients dying needlessly, the NHS watchdog has said.
About 400 more people died at Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2008 than would be expected, the Healthcare Commission said.
It said there were deficiencies at "virtually every stage" of emergency care and said managers pursued targets at the detriment of patient care.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson has apologised and launched an inquiry.
One of the worst examples of care cited in the watchdog's report was the use of receptionists to carry out initial checks on patients.
'Complete failure'
Mr Johnson said a review of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, would be carried out, focusing on the years 2002 to 2007.
He said there would also be an independent review of the trust's emergency care and that he had asked the National Quality Board to ensure the early warning systems for underperformance across the whole NHS were working properly

Read more here

This is also very sad.

"Every single day for four months, myself, my brother or my dad, we visited. We fed her, we tried to clean her when she was left in her own faeces and her own urine.
It was her dignity really. She was left on a bed-pan in agony one day, when I walked into the ward and I could hear her screaming - the nurses were so busy, they'd actually forgotten.
I'm so disappointed that my mum went in there just to be helped.
She'd beaten cancer, she just needed help with her physiotherapy and I trusted them and they let me down bitterly. They let my mum down, they let my family down.
She so wanted to live, at one point she grabbed hold of my hand and said: 'Please, Deb, don't let me die in here."

Read more here


Christ. It actually sounds a hell of a lot worse than my hospital if you can believe that. I have yet to see someone drinking from vases or left on a bedpan for 10 hours.

"The interim chief executive, Eric Morton, said lessons had been learned and that staffing levels had been increased"

What does this asshole mean when he says that staffing levels will be increased? The son of a bitch means that they will recruit a bunch of less than minimum wage paid untrained "nursing cadets" who are not allowed to DO ANYTHING. They will put them in nurses uniforms in nearly the same colour as the qualified nurses. The public will think that the wards are staffed well. That is what this asshole means. These fuckwads NEVER learn their lessons. A cadet is not even near the level of an HCA but that is what we are getting.

At my hospital the nurses' uniform colour is like this and the cadets' uniform colour is like this. And it is only a stripe on otherwise white uniform. Yes they are different colours.