I read in the papers today that the NHS funding / staff shortage is so bad that one major hospital is considering delaying curative cancer treatment and reducing palliative care by up to 30%.
I have seen this first hand when my mother died in hospital due to a lung tumour last summer. Patients are being put into side rooms, alone, the door is closed and staff re-enter the room many hours later to see if they are still alive. End of life pain relief and care is not being administered because the staff are working flat out to try and do something for those who have some chance of survival.
To put it bluntly, in her final hours, my mother, who was semi-conscious, was slowly drowning in fluid which was building up. I had discussed “the end” with the consultant treating her and knew what to expect. The plan was to effectively render her unconscious with morphine based pain relief drugs, which would most likely bring her life to an end peacefully. The problem that I hadn’t foreseen was that this major hospital, which serves a city, only had two S2 doctors on duty overnight. An S2 Doctor is a Doctor 2 years out of medical school. Of course it took hours to get one of them to my mother, when they arrived they knew absolutely nothing about her case and initially wanted to send her for Physiotherapy to help her breathing. I had to brief the doctor regarding the end of life plan. It was in the notes, but the Doctor was clearly too busy to wade through the notes of every patient.
After many hours of unnecessary suffering on my mother’s part, the Doctor eventually took the correct course of action. I slept at the hospital in the side room with my mother until she died. If I hadn’t been there, she would have been left in that room, alone, to suffer all night. It was only my persistence that caused a Doctor to see her and act upon the consultant’s plan.
This is no criticism of the NHS staff, they were doing more than their best, in fact the staff are so good and hard working, no MP is fit to utter the letters NHS. The simple fact is there are too many patients and not enough staff and staff costs money. In fact I saw the S2 Doctor as I left hospital the following morning. She looked totally exhausted and ill. She was still on duty and I had to wonder if her fatigue levels were beyond what is safe.
Is it now time to use the foreign aid budget to fund the NHS? This staff shortage is going to take at least 2 years to fix if we start recruiting today. Do we need to only treat people here working in the UK or UK passport holders? Health tourism is absorbing resources, how much is debatable, but in the NHS’s present state, even a little is far too much.
I have seen this first hand when my mother died in hospital due to a lung tumour last summer. Patients are being put into side rooms, alone, the door is closed and staff re-enter the room many hours later to see if they are still alive. End of life pain relief and care is not being administered because the staff are working flat out to try and do something for those who have some chance of survival.
To put it bluntly, in her final hours, my mother, who was semi-conscious, was slowly drowning in fluid which was building up. I had discussed “the end” with the consultant treating her and knew what to expect. The plan was to effectively render her unconscious with morphine based pain relief drugs, which would most likely bring her life to an end peacefully. The problem that I hadn’t foreseen was that this major hospital, which serves a city, only had two S2 doctors on duty overnight. An S2 Doctor is a Doctor 2 years out of medical school. Of course it took hours to get one of them to my mother, when they arrived they knew absolutely nothing about her case and initially wanted to send her for Physiotherapy to help her breathing. I had to brief the doctor regarding the end of life plan. It was in the notes, but the Doctor was clearly too busy to wade through the notes of every patient.
After many hours of unnecessary suffering on my mother’s part, the Doctor eventually took the correct course of action. I slept at the hospital in the side room with my mother until she died. If I hadn’t been there, she would have been left in that room, alone, to suffer all night. It was only my persistence that caused a Doctor to see her and act upon the consultant’s plan.
This is no criticism of the NHS staff, they were doing more than their best, in fact the staff are so good and hard working, no MP is fit to utter the letters NHS. The simple fact is there are too many patients and not enough staff and staff costs money. In fact I saw the S2 Doctor as I left hospital the following morning. She looked totally exhausted and ill. She was still on duty and I had to wonder if her fatigue levels were beyond what is safe.
Is it now time to use the foreign aid budget to fund the NHS? This staff shortage is going to take at least 2 years to fix if we start recruiting today. Do we need to only treat people here working in the UK or UK passport holders? Health tourism is absorbing resources, how much is debatable, but in the NHS’s present state, even a little is far too much.
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