The BritMeds 2007 (16)
“In any pantheon of really, really, really thick bastards….”
So starts the DK as he takes an outsiders' look at the Secretary of State for Health
We can always rely on the DK for a coruscating Anglo-Saxon analysis of the NHS as seen from the outside. From the inside, of course, Dr Rant and his team are the spawn of the DK and have kept us all hugely entertained. Those of you how have missed some of Rant’s rants should take a look at:
Stick this pole up your arse, Patsy
Cervical Cancer : What a tosser
Think again Splatzy
It would be fair to say though, to borrow the words of the late and not so great LBJ. that it is always easier to piss in to the tent. The Rant team of doctors have therefore been taking a look as what we could to save the NHS. They do not, as you would expect, mince words.
Take a look at :
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Children down, vaginas to go.
“I’m a medical student, get me out of here, finished paediatrics, and was not looking forward to gynaecology, but then realised that “I love vaginas”
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Tempers appear to be heating up at Harrogate with the RCN voting for industrial action.
Frontpoint systems takes a look at the nurses, who are getting angry
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PJC Journal (I am not a number, I am a free man) looks at the latest bit of government control freakery in “Tag dementia sufferers says Science Minister”
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A medical student struggles through mock OSCEs
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“For many, the NHS is part of what it means to be British. It expresses values that are ingrained in the British character - fairness and decency, compassion and a belief in the power of community.”Who said that? You will not believe it. Mens sana takes a look in “Then and Now”
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An anguished patient finally finds effective treatment for his chronic disabling medical condition, but it is not available on the NHS
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The Big Opt Out looks a the Public Accounts Committee, which has published a truly damning report on the NHS computer project.
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Choose and Book is unnecessary and is driving GPs mad. Looks like the hospital doctors are enjoying it too….
Dr Grumble takes a look
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A young doctor sits in with the "health care professionals".
A lady comes in for her pneumococcal vaccine. She is at high risk of getting pneumonia because she has chronic obstructive airways disease from smoking. She tells the Nurse that she doesn't understand why she needs this jab because she has already had her flu jab. The Nurse tells her that the difference between pneumonia and flu is that "pneumonia is just a really really bad case of flu"And then :
A 9 year old girl is brought by her grandma because she is having headaches….
Dr Crippen’s practice does not let nurses and HCAs loose in this fashion.
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The Parable of Gibbo
When I was at medical school, in our first year there was this guy called James “Gibbo” Gibson. Gibbo was a complete pisshead. I mean, Gibbo was the kind of student that gives students a bad reputation. He would go out a get hammered literally every night for three weeks straight and, on the few occasions he did manage to make it into uni for lectures, he would just fall asleep, hungover. Unsurprisingly, Gibbo failed his first year med school exams. Our med school allowed him to re-sit the year, but Gibbo didn’t change his spots, failed again and was eventually kicked off the course. Gibbo switched courses and did a physiology degree and this is when I lost touch with him. I heard that he had to re-sit a year of his new degree but eventually graduated with a third. Fair enough.
Fast forward to the first day of my surgical house-officer job (in my first year as a qualified doctor) and I had walked onto my ward for the first time. I’m introducing myself to a couple of the nurses when I hear a voice behind me saying, “Mikey-mate! How are you!”
It’s Gibbo. Gibbo is dressed very smartly, wearing a nice suit. It turns out that Gibbo had been appointed as our ward manager.
The junior doctor is very angry. See how he proposes to manage the managers
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A mother of four died after a “gross failure” by NHS staff to provide basic medical attention on two separate occasions, an inquest has ruled. Alison Christian, 36, died in agony from a perforated duodenal ulcer after accident and emergency doctors and a nurse answering an out-of-hours phone line failed to detect the symptoms of peritonitis.
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The American right wing is looking at all the faults of he NHS and predicting that Hilary Clinton will bring them all over the the USA.
So says BizzyBlog
They do not seem to care much for British contraceptive advice to children either.
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Wat Tyler, normally economically sound, believes that anyone who works for the government should be paid as small a salary as possible.
…but like it or lump it, what he says represents what the general public think of overpaid, fat-cat consultants.
Wat would undoubtedly agree with this:
A brilliant and insightful report from the National Audit Office (NAO) has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that NHS consultants are big lazy fat bastards who gorge themselves on tax payer's money while doing minimal amounts of work.Dr Rant looks at the hospital consultants
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…if you get a Paramedic then you are guaranteed to survive, while if you get an EMT then you just have a 'stretcher monkey' and. will. DIE.
Tom Reynolds is very unhappy
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Recently I've been struck by the fact that the NHS seems to be going through a phase of Taylorism or (so called) Scientific Management which was a fad in manufacturing management circles in the 1920s, but now seems to be being applied to services industries, as well. The days of the men in white coats and stopwatches not stethoscopes are here. The idea is that you break down all the actions needed into lots of component parts and look for the most cost effective (ie quick, cheap, and deskilled) option for each. You can see why accountants might like it.
It was a pretty awful (and unsuccessful) management fad, turning people into robots on the factory assembly line making cars, and didn't last long. But it's even more horrifying now, applied to medical services as it makes access to fully skilled medical professionals more and more difficult.
Unhappiness caused by exposure to a Health Care Assistant
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How many nursing students does it take to determine that a patient is dead?
Okay, so this story about nursing students’ lack of supervision has surfaced in the UK recently. I was prepared to read about something shocking, like say a nursing student who was left alone with a coding patient. Instead I read that this student was complaining that he had been left alone with a patient from a dementia unit that had soiled himself.
Pixel RN has the answers
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Empathy! Empathy! They’ve all got it empathy!
Mental nurse looks at nursing training as it was 25 years ago.
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The jaundiced views of a free born Englishman from behind the barbed wire of a Wiltshire farm - blasting the Bogusmongers and other assorted pondlife.
An Englisman’s Castle takes a look at patients starving to death because nurse do not have time to feed them
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James Gerrard, a GP in Leeds, said: "Out of the six doctors in our practice, three of us object to abortion. I had made up my mind on abortion before entering the medical profession. I feel the foetus is a person and killing that foetus is wrong."
The Stand to Reason Blog looks at the “abortion revolt” in the UK
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On a cheerful note, a new blog from Dr David Coddingsteine provides some excellent pictures, and tells us why “I buy books I never read…”
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Compared to the NHS the Gromboolian state health system looks like pre-Nightingale Scutari. Only those with a desire to commit suicide by hideous disease would use it willingly. Virtually everyone with western expectations (and I include the growing Black middle-class, here) has private medical insurance. Yep, we have the dreaded "American system" every leftie talks about whenever someone tries to reform the NHS.The Remittance Man, an ex-pat Brit living in the colonises looks at the NHS
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A DOCTOR was today facing a medical hearing after punching his partner and breaking his nose.
Oh dear. More tales from the GMC
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Dr Crippen is fed up that the local psychiatrist cannot be bothered to see alcoholics. (See David’s story here)
And there is evidence that even brief intervention by a doctor will help.
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Grade Inflation spells loss of freedom in the NHS
Nurses are rapidly replacing doctors in out-of-hours services throughout the NHS (though this is driven by poor financial management inside the primary care trusts rather than good patient care).
The Adam Smith Institute
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There is a shortage of nurses to care for premature babies
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Grandma was a suffragette
the looming abortion crisis isn't because of changes in the law, or because of increased campaigning from the pseudo-morality peddlers who hang around outside clinics with their photoshopped foetuses and dubious scientific facts. It's because some doctors feel that their personal opinions should stop them doing their job.
Could you pass the “dinner party test” on abortion?
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NHS BLOG DOCOTOR got Manchester Me thinking – and he says that “I do believe there is a psychological aspect to this illness and that is why CBT does help some patients and not others.”
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Your daughter is MINE because its my ’societal preference’!
More schools will be encouraged to hand out the morning-after pill to underage girls after a strong endorsement of the service from Ofsted inspectors. Around one in three children already has easy access to condoms and emergency contraception - without their parents’ knowledge or consent - thanks to sexual health clinics based at secondary schools.
The Americans do not like it. How do the Brits feel?
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The MTAS/MMC week
Dr Crippen took last week off MTAS. The problems have changed a little, but they have not gone away. The doctors are not getting a fair hearing from the media, and in particular the government’s media mouthpiece spins a plausible web of deceit:
Holby City ignorantly and misleadingly showed a junior doctor being offered a job while in the operating theatre with his consultant, and upon being offered the job the junior mentioned how content he was with becoming a consultant faster than ever thanks to HMG's butchering of medical training.The Ferret Fancier takes a look at the biased BBC’s dramatised whitewash of MTAS
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If the computer says no, it’s VSO says Dr Grumble
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The young men (and women) are angry about MTAS, but it is not just angry young men (and women). Dr Michelle Tempest reports an exclusive interview with an eminent Cambridge University Physician, an ex-dean of medicine.
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On the same day as Mr Blair was trying to sell or spin his NHS legacy, Mr Johnson (Chairman of the British Medical Association) said:
"It's disgraceful that thousands of our best doctors could have their NHS careers wrecked through no reason other than government mistakes and poor workforce planning."The Psychiatrist is angry
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SHP has a piano lesson. What’s that got to do with MTAS? Think about it.
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Not so happy house hunting
So about this time, I should be house-hunting. When the timetable for MTAS results came out, I planned myself two weeks of leave to try and buy somewhere to live. This week was when I'd find out if I'd been successful in round one of MTAS and I'd know roughly in which county to buy a house.
Dr Paul Clayton
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The Ferret Fancier, once again, has accumulated a portfolio of leaked documents from management and the DoH, all which is essential reading:
Muck unearthed
Sniffing out the lies
Rectal seepage
MTAS dynamite
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Tin hats will be going on again at the GMC. Rita is back in action.
Have the doctors running Remedy UK realised that some of their senior colleagues might dispose of them by declaring them to be mentally ill?
Don’t be silly. It could not happen.
The A Team are Back - Rita Pal v General Medical Council The Judicial Review on their decision on Professor Rodderick Griffiths
"Any junior doctor whistleblowing under the GMC's Whistleblowing Protocol can be accused of being insane. They can also be accused of being inadequate at their job. This can be done without investigating the issues and without any evidence or verification. The director of public health is normally the first port of call for all whistleblowing concerns."
Read on here
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Please send your recommendations for next week’s BritMeds to: thebritmedsATnhsblogdoc.wanadoo.co.uk
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A couple of (I thought) minor errors, now corrected, in this week's BritMeds. I hope there are no more. It takes a fair time to read through all the recommendations and then assemble the whole post and, yes, a few errors creep in. A commentator styling himself as "A.N.O.N" has made some vitriolic comments, and couched them in a manner that I find aggressive and offensive. I have not had any complaints like this before. However, it may be I am wrong. If A.N.O.N's remarks are representative of a general feeling about the BritMeds, then clearly it is time to move on.
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