Risk, lawyers and the NHS don't mix

Tweet

There was an unmanned railway crossing in Texas a few years back that was suffering above average incidents of train collisions with traffic, resulting in deaths and serious injury, and so huge legal claims against the trains and train track companies. Amtrack thought it was drunks and suicides as per usual but acted anyway and cutback the trees and brushes to give drivers more visibility to cross. Yes, you guessed it. With more vision the drivers and truckers took bigger risks and so even more collisions. That is the nature of the human condition and the need to blame others for everything. That is way 1-in-100 Americans are trained lawyers. The NHS is under crisis here and have similar issues over risks. The government are underfunding councils so they have to cut carehome provision for old folks with dementia, forcing those old people back into hospital wards and so massive pressure on the hospital and so malpractice claims pouring in across all areas of healthcare and more and more mistakes are made due to under staffing and over capacity. This problem compounds itself every year. Patients and relative who have suffered loss or injury in care are increasing and they are being hassled by lawyers to sue. Cash can’t replace our loved ones but it’s better than nothing to soften the blow. This becomes a culture and any alleged malpractice becomes a target, cutting NHS budgets further. The patients and relatives know it’s probably not the medical staffs fault and down to money and the fact they are overworked but just can’t resist. NHS Heart operations also came under threat in a different way as specialist heart hospitals were threatened with closure due to an above average mortality rate. But what was happening was the more senior and experienced surgeons were ‘selecting’ their heart patients and limiting their operations to the patients most likely to survive such an invasive procedure and so the docs had better survival rates. The younger surgeons then got the leftovers and so higher death rates, and for their hospitals, and so they were threatened with closure. This really is how the world works. NHS Dentists had quickly worked out with the new cost saving contracts where they were paid a set amount per treatment it was more lucrative to pull teeth, whether they just needed a filling or not, as it was to spend more time on fillings and crowns, packing in more treatments per day. And so teeth extraction rose for two years soon after. The word got out they were pulling not filling and so less people went to the dentists, solving the funding crisis. Most people’s teeth are an 18 hole golf course by their 60th birthday in the U.K. due to the new rules. You just can’t give people an excuse not to go to the dentists. It will only end badly. This deceit is where money is being saved. If you think of a juggler it’s while the ball are in the air that the illusion of saving money is made. Eventually that ball will land and has to be funded but not while it up in the air, why the HS employ jugglers and not new doctors. The government did it with nurses. They cut training bursaries for domestic nurses who would go straight into British hospitals and fill vacancies during their training and then when fully qualified. It was simply cheaper to bring in qualified Filipino nurses trained over there for a quarter of the cost and not train the British ones. I know the NHS has been nicking doctors and nurses from all around the world for ages but you still need to exploit the ones you have. Hopefully Brexit will encourage that change.