Disgusted at the NHS

tandraig

can i just say - I dont want a nurse to be a clinician - i want a nurse!!! I have also previously said that in other hospital i had experience of (or rather my very ill son did) the nursing care was excellent also have to mention Prince Charles hospital in Merthyr (know locally as Faulty Towers) which has excellent nurses too. pity their A &E isnt so great. was clean and the food surprisingly good!
my main prob is with the city hospital to which all the GPs refer you. its carp!! yet i have met some nurses from there who think they are the best!! while telling you they dont wash patients dont have time to talk to them dont even have time to learn their names! nursing??? i dont think so

Oldernotwiser

loftus wrote: »

The percentage who complain is small......and do they also tell surveys which ask if they received good care lies just to get them to go away? All 93% of them?

As I said earlier, many people have very low standards and are satisfied with substandard care.

notlongnow_2

patchwork_cat wrote: »

Notlongnow - are you seriously saying that due to patient confidentiality you couldn't say sorry I was late a patient died, come on - no names no pack drill just information!

If there was a way that I could avoid it then no I wouldnt. Patients dont want to know about death, especially the poorly ones or the elderly ones. also, no matter how well you wash your hands or put a plastic apron on, the next patient then knows you have just dealt with a dead body, which is something that a lot of people have big hang ups about. Plus then it leads to 'aww were they near here' 'what did they die of' etc. In my experience it does neither me, or the next patient any good... but thats just my practice that works for me. Its usually easier to say that 'something came up with a patient that couldnt wait' I used the death of a patient as an example. It could be a whole manner of things that delay us, death is just one of them.

I dont discuss patients wth anyone, you never know who knows who in my town and can put together the most tiniest, mundane little snips of info to realise its Fred from the post office..lol..

loftus

Oldernotwiser wrote: »

As I said earlier, many people have very low standards and are satisfied with substandard care.

Yeah - all 93% of them - per-lease!

Because the independently gathered stats don't tally with either your personal experience or what you want them to say lets just rubbish them or ignore them - or better still let's just insult the people who were surveyed.

Oldernotwiser

loftus wrote: »

Yeah - all 93% of them - per-lease!

Because the independently gathered stats don't tally with either your personal experience or what you want them to say lets just rubbish them or ignore them - or better still let's just insult the people who were surveyed.

Of course not all 93% of them and probably not even a majority!

However, a sizable number of people have low standards about all sorts of things, education and restaurants being just 2 examples, and this would make quite a difference to the figures.

If you want to improve standards, you first have to accept that something is wrong, rather than massaging statistics.

Edit: Another viewpoint can be found here,

"GPs top NHS patient satisfaction survey
Wednesday 28th January 2009



GPs have again topped a survey which tested patients' satisfaction with NHS services with 76% of people saying they were happy with the service they received at their community practice.

Research, carried out as part of the latest British Social Attitudes report, also showed outpatients services stood at a promising 60%. Overall only 51% of NHS patients said they were satisfied with the health service.

Worryingly, inpatient treatment satisfaction was down from 74% in 1983 to 49% now, while concern about the quality of medical treatment remained at 49%.

loftus

I accept that it doesn't get things right in a significant number of cases, and that even one case is one case too many. I will happily concede that some of those people who are happy with their treatment are probably just influenced by having a good outcome and will overlook some things that weren't as they should be, but I won't accept that these people form a majority or even a significant minority of the 93%.
Some people here seem unable to believe that the majority of people are happy with the treatment they receive, some even seem to think that almost no-one receives good treatment.
Threads like this are like hotel reviews on Trip Advisor, where more people who have a bad experience are willing to post whilst those who are happy see no need to.
The biggest problems with NHS is it being top heavy with bureaucrats, having huge funding increases without proper reforms, contracting out to the lowest bidder of essential services leading to a massive lowering of stadards and having to deal with an agenda, and targets, set by politicians rather than clinicians. Of course nurses should nurse, but many, many of them are intelligent and experienced and capable of carrying clinical tasks.
It's far from perfect and there are many lessons it can learn from the systems employed in other countries but I am happy it's there if I or the people whom I love need it.

Errata

The difficulty with the Patient Satisfaction Survey is that it isn't sent out out to every patient, and it's also self selecting. I'd be intererested to know what the returns rate is.

Errata

Loftus, I know what you're trying to say, but it's hard to defend a service which has, as you say, massively lowered standards and expect people not to notice the effect that has on them personally.

loftus

The difference between the British Social Attitudes survey and that of the Care Quality Comission is that, for its headline figure, the BSA surveys 3,500 people regardless of whether they or their families have had experience of the NHS or not - it is based on their perception, largely garnered through the media. The last stats they have available on their site , admittedly not from their latest (2007) survey, shows that of the people surveyed less than half had used the NHS within the last year.
The CQC surveys actual patients. 70,000 of them
In the latest BSA survey 30% of people expressed disatisfaction with the NHS - not as good a headline figure as that quoted in the paper.

To quote a report:-

"One of the headlines of the report is that the British public is more satisfied with the National Health Service than at any time since 1984. It confirms a previous finding, that people with recent experiences of the NHS tend to be far more satisfied with it than those who have had no contact"

funguy

The NHS is never going to be perfect....

I see everyone complaining about standards, service, access, quality etc etc but the doctors and nurses are working on the staffing and resources they have!! Maybe people should speak to their MPs and say that outpatient clinic appts should be a maximum 4 weeks wait (currently up to 10 months in our area) , GPs shouldnt have more than an average 500 people on their list so that they can spend time and give appt to their patients - currently averages over 2000 patient per GP. Also that there should be nurse for every 6 patients on the ward etc etc....the list is endless - all this costs money and the government wont pay for it!! So please stop blaming the staff in the NHS and shout at the government who have let this situation occur!

All i will say is that the best and dedicated nurses and doctors are leaving in droves from the NHS because of the above - they dislike it as much as patients.....the future is likely to be a service with foreign trained staff on a "pile it high, sell it cheap" standard.......!