A little rant.
At various hospitals (which will remain unnamed), the trust will only pay for one anaesthetic nurse to be on night cover. Because of transfusion safety regulations, during the night shift, anaesthetic nurses are the only people allowed to handle and manage blood transfusions in the theatres (this is a good thing - specialization means a very low possibility of transfusion accident).
Now, a true story (but I won't say when/where this happened). Three patients were in theatre during the night and started to bleed out at the same time. But there was only one nurse who had card access to the blood transfusion machine. Long story short, there was a huge amount of panic, a lot of screaming, the swipe card wouldn't work straight away, samples got mixed up despite all the safety precautions that had been put in place, and a patient was given four units of someone else's blood. By a massive stroke of good fortune, the blood groups were a precise match, as the mortality for transfusing four units of incorrect blood is pretty much 100%.
If the patient had died, the lawsuit and subsequent compensation payout would have run into the millions (£2-3 million at least). To pay for one additional anaesthetic nurse to cover night shifts (something that doctors in the trust had been calling for for nigh on years) would cost less than £30,000 a year.
This sort of **** happens all the time in the NHS. There is cost-cutting everywhere but when mistakes happen as a direct result, the payouts are enormous, running up a ~600million a year bill. Lots of these could be prevented by having more nurses to monitor patients, or more doctors on night cover. I can think of two examples off the top of my head where a staffing shortage has led to a death or disability which subsequently led to a compensation claim. Other examples include skimping out on investigation resources (like theatre bedside ultrasound machines).
Rant over. Something in management needs to give.
At various hospitals (which will remain unnamed), the trust will only pay for one anaesthetic nurse to be on night cover. Because of transfusion safety regulations, during the night shift, anaesthetic nurses are the only people allowed to handle and manage blood transfusions in the theatres (this is a good thing - specialization means a very low possibility of transfusion accident).
Now, a true story (but I won't say when/where this happened). Three patients were in theatre during the night and started to bleed out at the same time. But there was only one nurse who had card access to the blood transfusion machine. Long story short, there was a huge amount of panic, a lot of screaming, the swipe card wouldn't work straight away, samples got mixed up despite all the safety precautions that had been put in place, and a patient was given four units of someone else's blood. By a massive stroke of good fortune, the blood groups were a precise match, as the mortality for transfusing four units of incorrect blood is pretty much 100%.
If the patient had died, the lawsuit and subsequent compensation payout would have run into the millions (£2-3 million at least). To pay for one additional anaesthetic nurse to cover night shifts (something that doctors in the trust had been calling for for nigh on years) would cost less than £30,000 a year.
This sort of **** happens all the time in the NHS. There is cost-cutting everywhere but when mistakes happen as a direct result, the payouts are enormous, running up a ~600million a year bill. Lots of these could be prevented by having more nurses to monitor patients, or more doctors on night cover. I can think of two examples off the top of my head where a staffing shortage has led to a death or disability which subsequently led to a compensation claim. Other examples include skimping out on investigation resources (like theatre bedside ultrasound machines).
Rant over. Something in management needs to give.
.