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The disgraceful account of Joseph Nixon’s last few days stay in Maidstone Hospital has highlighted the on-going problems within the NHS. The 87 year-old Dunkirk veteran and former Coldstream Guard had contracted a Clostridium difficile infection during his hospital stay and died recently. Jackie Nixon, his daughter, reported that she “ended up having to change (his) bed for him the whole time because otherwise he would be left lying in his own soiled sheets for three to four hours at a time…”. His case vividly illustrates that the standard of delivery of healthcare in this country is far from acceptable.
Clostridium difficile (C Diff) is undeniably a difficult infection to treat. The bacterial infection does not harm otherwise healthy people, however, problems occur when very poorly patients on hospital wards are treated with antibiotics. C Diff can then overwhelm other ‘competitor’ bacteria in the gut leading to profuse diarrhoea, and in worse case scenarios, death through intestinal perforation and septicaemia. Not surprisingly, the elderly are most at risk, with over 80% of reported cases being found in people over the age of 65. Although a challenge to treat, simple procedures such as washing hands between cases and isolation of the patient can help to prevent the infection spreading around the hospital ward. And here is the crux of the problem. To prevent such spread a hospital would ideally have access to isolation wards, the capacity to provide individual nursing and a fully-staffed infectious control clinical team. All of that costs money, and lots of it.
Since 2002, public spending on healthcare in this country has doubled. On Tuesday, the Chancellor announced that NHS funding by 2010 will be £110 billion per year, i.e. the NHS will be spending £3500 per second. I suspect that the ‘average person in the street’ would think that a doubling of expenditure to that level would lead to a better service. By better, I would expect they mean shorter waiting times for GP and hospital appointments, better working conditions for staff and, above all, a cleaner and friendlier hospital environment to be treated in. Unfortunately, the tragic reports today provide further evidence to suggest otherwise. The scandal surrounding Maidstone Hospital has dispelled any claim that the large increase in funds provided by the British public has been well-spent by this increasingly discredited government.
This Labour administration’s obsession with top-down targets and their mistaken belief that the problems within the NHS were simply due to underfunding ,have been shown to have been disgracefully naive judgements. Decisions, such as the on-going, appalling overspend on the Patient Records Project (PRP), have led to financial shortages for front-line staff. The PRP is the most expensive IT project in the world, and I, and many of my medical colleagues, fail to see how the estimated £15 billion pounds budget (latest est. and rising) can ever be good value for money, particularly in a system so starved of funds on the front-line. Why choose to spend so much money on an IT project not deemed a priority by the medical profession? What of the £500 million (and rising) spent on management consultancy fees? What about the unfairness of spending more money per head on health in Scotland than in England? Why are there now more managers in the NHS than medical staff? Why did the Labour government spend all of our money before reforming the system? However, the key question for the Prime Minister from any tax-payer would be the following – If Mr Nixon, a distinguished war veteran, can be so badly treated, where has all the money gone Mr Brown?
Too many questions and yet not enough answers. This government is so bereft of the insight and ability required to manage such an important public service that getting answers will be next to impossible. The Conservative Party has a moral duty to continue to oppose this useless administration, so that the NHS can be properly reformed. By doing so, it will go some way to preventing the tragic case of Mr Nixon being repeated in the future.
