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Who cares about the patients? Patricia Hewitt is thankfully gone, we have a new Health Secretary and the Government claims that the NHS budget deficit problems have been solved. This looks like good news for the Government, after years of bad stories from the NHS - hospital beds being reduced, A&E units closing, widespread redundancies, patients suing to get life-saving medicines and talented newly-qualified doctors who can’t get work. However, the job of the NHS is not to fudge financial figures, it is to save lives. So we should judge the Government’s management of our health service on whether ordinary taxpayers feel it is safe to go into our hospitals. On the NHS’s own estimates, 34,000 people a year die unnecessarily each year in today’s NHS hospitals [Patient Safety Report NHS website 2007]. Other calculations come up with around 38,000 [Comparison of death rates from cancers, strokes and hospital-acquired infections across Europe]. But whichever is the correct figure, this is an awful lot of people dying unnecessarily – about a hundred a day. Compare this to Iraq where an estimated 35,000 people were killed in 2006 and we call that a ‘civil war’. In addition to this mass slaughter, the NHS also estimates that another 25,000 people are unnecessarily permanently disabled in NHS hospitals every year. The differences between the performance of our health service and those of some of our European neighbours are striking. Over 300,000 people a year get infections in our hospitals and of these 5,400 people a year die (about 100 a week). If we could bring these down to the levels of other Northern European countries, we would only have 100 deaths a year from hospital acquired infections (just 2 a week). Moreover, of the 157,000 people who die from serious illnesses like cancer or strokes each year, about 23,000 (over 400 a week) more would survive if they were treated in any other Northern European country rather than by our NHS. But cold statistics give little real insight into the human disaster that is going on in our health service. Behind these appalling statistics are tens of thousands of family tragedies. My forty year old husband Paul was admitted to the George Eliot hospital in Nuneaton with stomach pains. Over the course of the next year, he suffered kidney failure three times in two different hospitals as a result of not being given enough water to drink. The third time he went into hospital was just to have his little toe amputated. Two days after his operation, he was discharged in complete renal failure and that night went into a coma. Paul survived, but only after losing both legs and having a tracheotomy. Under pressure to free up Paul’s bed, the doctor on duty hadn’t the time to look at the blood tests done that day which showed Paul was about to die. Finally, months later in constant pain and unable to walk, talk, see or breathe properly, Paul took his own life. Unfortunately, Paul’s story is not just an isolated aberration. Thousands of people are dying every year in today’s NHS because of a lack of basic care. While visiting my husband in hospital, I saw several patients a week dying from neglect. The nurses used call this ‘hospital syndrome’ and would often say to me, “Mandy, last night we lost another one from hospital syndrome”. However, relatives were always told that the patients had died of natural causes. Moreover, since the publication of my book Who cares? I have been contacted by people with over eight hundred similar stories – of their relatives dying in NHS hospitals from poor care and lack of food and water. This widespread neglect seemed to be confirmed at a coroner’s inquest in July 2006 into the death of Olive Nockel, when a consultant physician giving evidence said that he saw two to three patients dying from dehydration every week at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital [Times 7 August 2006]. Throughout Paul’s treatment, NHS doctors and managers tried to deny any responsibility for all the things that were going wrong. I only found out the truth because a nurse was so outraged at what was happening to us that she sent me copies of blood tests done on Paul that the NHS claimed didn’t exist. Again, Paul’s case is not an isolated incident. In the eight hundred or so cases that I have been sent, there are numerous examples of key medical records going ‘missing’, of bereaved families being threatened by NHS lawyers and of the NHS throwing legal actions at the media to prevent them reporting stories of patients dying from neglect. In today’s NHS, mortality rates are rising, cover-ups are widespread, figures are fudged and patients are neglected so people can further their own careers by appearing to implement the policies and meet the targets dreamt up by their bosses at the Department of Health. Rather than seeing patients as their responsibility, NHS staff refer to them disparagingly as ‘bed-blockers’ when they stay in hospital longer than planned and as ‘frequent flyers’ when patients have serious conditions that require them to keep going back to hospital. This is not the NHS that this Government inherited. Amanda Steane is the author of Who Cares?: One Family's Shocking Story of Care in Today's NHS Related Links Read the first chapter of Amanda Steane's book here Amanda Steane can be contacted on www.nhs-whocares.com
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