NHS=Negligent Health Service

Dreadi said:
A chap I know fell over drunk last Saturday walking home from a party...he's was found 7am then next morning by a dog walker having fallen over and hit his head and passed out. Fractures eye socket, bleed behind his eye and a bleed on the brain. Unable to speak for two days, barely awake for more 3 minutes every few hours and generally in a very bad way.
Had an update from his brother last night that despite a high level consultant fighting for him to remain in hospital, he was discharged Friday (6 days later) with nobody at his own house to look after him, still unable to stay awake and suffering life altering brain damage having failed every cognitive test he's taken because they need his bed!
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There is some miscommunication going on somewhere here. They wouldn't discharge a traumatic brain injury because they need the bed. The consultant needs to sign him off as medically fit for discharge, without that he's not going anywhere. Perhaps the patient self discharged?
Alcohol is an absolute curse on this country.
 
tres said:
There is some miscommunication going on somewhere here. They wouldn't discharge a traumatic brain injury because they need the bed. The consultant needs to sign him off as medically fit for discharge, without that he's not going anywhere. Perhaps the patient self discharged?
Alcohol is an absolute curse on this country.
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I highly doubt he self discharged as he's barely able to hold a meaningful conversation without falling asleep from what his brother told me last night.
He was involved in a hit and run quite a few years ago which left him in a coma for about a week and caused brain trauma and his brother said they are struggling with his current brain scans as there's a lot of scar tissue and dark patches left from that previously. The consultant who was trying to keep him has sent a letter for his employer and apparently it was pretty brutal and basically said there's a good chance he won't be fit for work again.
 
tres said:
There is some miscommunication going on somewhere here. They wouldn't discharge a traumatic brain injury because they need the bed. The consultant needs to sign him off as medically fit for discharge, without that he's not going anywhere. Perhaps the patient self discharged?
Alcohol is an absolute curse on this country.
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Given the NHS has a problem with bed blockers, patients waiting to be discharged but have no care plan in place, I agree with you. I cannot see any doctor discharging anyone in that state. It would lead to charges of professional incompetence.
 
Dis86 said:
This thread literally exists because of professional incompetence.
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Absolutely, in my own department at our Trust we have about 250 Negligence cases a year with many of them being patients being discharged when they shouldn't have been.
HOWEVER, we have had many cases where patients self discharged but still went to the Solicitors.
 
ianh said:
Just because percentages sometimes don't really get the scale of the money being lost across - 1.7% of the 2023 NHS Budget is £2.86 BILLION being given away in compensation (based on the reported budget being £168B) and people still don't think its broken, wow!
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And I suspect that amount could've been massively reduced if we had enough doctors, nurses, beds, equipment.
(The amount needed to be invested probably less than the amount of compensation paid...but I guess it comes from a different "pocket/budget" so it doesn't count. Ridiculous.)
Not to mention the patients that could have avoided harm in the first place.
 
ianh said:
Just because percentages sometimes don't really get the scale of the money being lost across - 1.7% of the 2023 NHS Budget is £2.86 BILLION being given away in compensation (based on the reported budget being £168B) and people still don't think its broken, wow!
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On the other had it's worth noting that the NHS only had something like 13k cases where a payout was made, with the single biggest area being Obstetrics which takes up an even bigger slice of the money (something like 60% from what I've seen), it's worth noting that a single compensation claim for injuries sustained in childbirth/pregnancy to a baby can be many multiple millions of pounds as potentially the NHS will end up paying out for the entire life of the baby.

It's also worth noting that the US healthcare system/industry also has a fairly high compensation payout, as when something goes seriously wrong medically it is very easily life changing, and thus high payouts per claims.

Compare that to say the number of hip replacements per year (100k), or the number of heart operations (300k), or the number of births in hospitals (600k), consider that's just a small selection of procedures the NHS does, and the number of actual cases suddenly doesn't look too bad - although there are areas where serious improvements definitely need to be made (maternity care in the UK is dropping through the floor from what I understand due to staffing etc).
 
tamzzy said:
And I suspect that amount could've been massively reduced if we had enough doctors, nurses, beds, equipment.
(The amount needed to be invested probably less than the amount of compensation paid...but I guess it comes from a different "pocket/budget" so it doesn't count. Ridiculous.)
Not to mention the patients that could have avoided harm in the first place.
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Yup

It's like not wanting to pay a little bit extra to staff, so instead of say paying £100 per ward per shift extra for it's staff to have a reasonable pay rise (or for an extra nurse), they're paying £500 a shift for an agency staffer as they can't maintain staffing levels.

The same sort of thing happens in all sorts of places, one of the examples I always go to for misplaced cost saving is in DVD releases, going back a few years the head of one of the US retailers who was also a DVD publisher/distributor and handled the distribution/CS for several other publishers answered a question about why they always tried to use a very specific, very slightly more expensive case type, his answer was simple and boiled down to "I see exactly how much the different cases cost, and I see the return rate for damaged in transit discs, and what caused the damage and a breakdown of the case types for loose discs, it costs (x cents) more per disc for this case but it saves many times that in replacements and CS time". IIRC the case he specified for his releases was something like 2c more than a standard amaray and maybe twice the price of some of the really cheap cases*, but saved a significant number of returns (each costing probably $5-10 dollars minimum if it was a standard release).

*There were some that were absolutely terrible, including one scanavo clone that was known to cause the discs to crack around the hub before you tried to remove them (they were insanely tight and put a lot of pressure on the disk, especially if the packaging machine wasn't perfect).
 
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Werewolf said:
It's like not wanting to pay a little bit extra to staff, so instead of say paying £100 per ward per shift extra for it's staff to have a reasonable pay rise (or for an extra nurse), they're paying £500 a shift for an agency staffer as they can't maintain staffing levels.
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Exactly this.

(Although I must add, it is precisely this that I have quit full-time work to locum, so have cut my hours and taken a payrise at the same time :cry: #marketforces #capitalism)
 
Werewolf said:
On the other had it's worth noting that the NHS only had something like 13k cases where a payout was made, with the single biggest area being Obstetrics which takes up an even bigger slice of the money (something like 60% from what I've seen), it's worth noting that a single compensation claim for injuries sustained in childbirth/pregnancy to a baby can be many multiple millions of pounds as potentially the NHS will end up paying out for the entire life of the baby.
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I think we've had an obstetrics case around 24 million.
Compare that to an RIP baby that may be around £30,000.

I'll give you another small fact, only around 15% to 20% of claims go through to the next round where the NHSR get involved, the rest have been stopped by the Claimants Solicitor.
I'm not sure how many cases fall by the side when they go to a proper Claim but that's where the NHSR and the Claimants Solicitor play tennis with figures.

I've also seen so many liars it's amazing.
People totally exaggerate what they get and there are guidelines for a lot of the payouts so if somebody said they got £500,000 for a misdiagnosed shoulder injury they are lying.
I personally know a family where the two kids split from their parents because they expected a cut of their Dad's 3 million payout, I 100% know he got £30,000.
 
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