I have spent a fair bit of time in hospital recently, visiting a family friend (who has sadly died). During the months of visiting I saw first hand - urine running across the floor, staff (nurses) stealing patients food, food being left in front of patients too weak to feed themselves then taken away without any help given to feed them, food recorded as being eaten when it was not, wrong medicine given, potassium drip which should have been given for one dose continued for three days and a stroke that went unnoticed by staff until friends and family insisted something was wrong, by which time it was too late to undo the damage. I have watched the hospital close wards due to 'Winter vomiting virus' and yet watched as doctors and nurses went through the barriers without any attempt to sanitise their hands or their equipment.
Against this, there stands a huge divide in standards within the Critical Care wards where the level of professionalism and care were stunning as I watched doctors and nurses fighting to support people on the very edge of death and bring them back to being able to live without the support of the machines that were keeping them alive.
The gulf in standards, quality and professionalism between Critical Care and the ordinary wards is a divide that you have to be very strong or very lucky to be able to survive. Some of the NHS is excellent, some is good and some is shamefully disgusting (one nurse wore her hair in matted dreadlocks and the stink of bad feet and B.O was nauseating, yet she worked in Critical Care).
The worst issue seems though to be an indifference to accountability. Doctors and consultants are above the rules and disregard hygiene controls. One Podiatrist working with diabetics never sterilised tools between one patient and the next and when challenged about the risk of giving MRSA to a diabetic, she said she never swabbed for MRSA because it would always come up positive and they would be given a hard time if they recorded too many positives.
I am disgusted at the failings of the NHS. I used to be responsible for the safety of millions of portions of foods and never had a single case of sickness, let alone a death. If I had failed, the company I worked for would have been wiped out from bad publicity, yet the NHS regularly infects those it is supposed to be caring for and disregards the fact that many people who fall foul of 'HAI' (hospital acquired infections) go on to be killed by their infections, yet despite the fact that the food industry proves every day that it is easily possible to control infection, the NHS gets away with killing people on a large scale because they have no accountability.
None of the things I have stated are hearsay - I personally witnessed each and every incident and many more besides.
Derek
