NHS Meltdown: Blow the Whistle on Neglect of Elderly Patients--and You Take the Fall
Our world is so upside-down. A nurse secretly filmed terrible neglect of elderly UK hospital patients--and she is sanctioned for misconduct! From the story:
An undercover nurse who carried out secret filming to reveal the neglect of elderly patients on a hospital ward was found guilty of misconduct. The Nursing and Midwifery Council ruled that Margaret Haywood, 58, had prioritised the filming of the BBC Panorama programme and not fulfilled her obligations as a nurse.No she embarrassed the powers that be who permitted the neglect in the first place. That will teach anyone who wants to tell the people of the UK how bad things are getting in their hospitals!
The Undercover Nurse programme, screened in July 2005, showed poor conditions at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. But chair of the panel, Linda Read, said that Ms Haywood "suspended her obligations ... to protect and support the health of individual patients" by making the film.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:55 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
The people of the NHS can go and screw themselves. Really. That is profoundly disgusting.
Good for her.
The current state of hierarchy that puts nurses subservient to doctors, and doctors and nurses subservient to hospital administrations, and is about power rather than care, is wacko. Not that carrying out doctors' instructions isn't part of nurses' job, but the best doctors LISTEN, and hospital administrations and doctors as the ultimate authority is just wrong. There has to be some kind of oversight of and formal form of authority over those who are "in charge." Looks like that has to be by those who are paying their salaries -- patients and their families. The insurance companies sure aren't going to do it right, and the medical establishment and the institutions themselves obviously aren't, and medmal cases obviously aren't enough. I'm not suggesting government control, but there may have to be some legislative innovations to straighten things out.
Until then, the best friend patients and those who care about them have is not the medical establishment; it's a good personal injury attorney. I wish Bush hadn't favored tort reform. Doctors complain about their insurance premiums, but it's the insurance companies and their lawyers who make them high, on purpose, not the awards. The insurance companies have convinced doctors, who are not trained to think logically, that patients are the enemy; no; THEY are; they want those malpractice insurance premiums, which come to a lot more than the awards do, as do the salaries of administrators without whom hospitals would be more like the places of care they are supposed to be. Doctors and hospitals DO do wrong; nurses do sometimes, too. But society has given doctors too much credibility, and the whole mess rests on that lynchpin; hospitals rest their "authority" on that of doctors. Good for that nurse. I only hope a lot of people are speaking up for her.
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