Wasting medical time and a Happy New Year to all in Accident and Emergency this evening

There is a crime of wasting police time but not one of wasting NHS time. NHS time is free as is Police time but waste Police time and you could do time.

If you drink 8 pints and fall over and fall asleep in a corner and are disturbed by the Police, who are concerned for your welfare, and proceed to hit out at one of them you will be arrested, fined or even jailed.

However, if you drink the same 8 pints and fall over spraining your ankle and, after walking 2 miles home, go to sleep and then awake the next morning and decide that your ankle hurts you can then dial 999. You are then taken free to an A&E department and get an x-ray and are told there is nothing wrong with you even though you “thought you had broken your ankle” which you walked on for 2 miles under the influence the night before.

You can even assault the staff and probably get away with it due to the “zero tolerance” of the NHS as you were “poorly”, “under the influence” or “stressed” due to your (self inflicted) “illness” with a good lawyer provided by the legal aid scheme.

You can then demand an “emergency appointment” within 48 hours to ask for a sick note because “you were ill” = pissed and can’t work because you can’t walk on your sprained, but not broken, ankle for at least 3 weeks. And can I have some painkillers “ ’cos it really hurts”?

And this is all free.

This is not made up it is a genuine and frequently repeated scenario in frontline NHS care and this story is from 20 years ago and no different today.

8 pints at £2.40 a pint = £ 19.20.

Ambulance at £ 167.00 a shout.

A&E at £ 79.00 a time.

GP appointment for a sick note at £20.00. Painkillers around £ 7.00 a shout.

Costs to employer and benefits agency don’t know these costs with any degree of authority.

A cheap night out? Unless you are a taxpayer.

Is there not a case of if you drive under the influence of alcohol and get caught you get fined but if you drink and misuse the NHS you get away free?

Given the increasing taxation the Party is exerting why not have a “if you are over the drink drive limit you get charged for all your NHS treatment” policy?

Simple and cheap to administer. Like speed cameras it could deliver millions apart from the fact the NHS is free but drive a car and it is not free unless you are a joy rider. The NHS has millions of joy riders. They are called drunken patients.

ND as a junior grunt well remembers counting how many ill patients they saw in a busy city centre A&E on a Saturday night single handed and out of 30 patients only 3 were not due to alcohol. One had an unexplained painful blood clot in their mouth, one had a stroke and the other almost drowned due to heart failure. These were the ill ones out of the thirty.

The rest were just pissed but hey they had paid their taxes on their booze and fags but complained bitterly when ND had to treat genuine illness in between the drunks that were waiting (to go onto a night club with their drunken and abusive mates). This applies equally to the Police, Fire and Ambulance services at this time of year and most Friday and Saturday nights.

We at ND would like to wish our readers a happy New Year and know full well that whatever we say people will continue to abuse the health service because it is free.

Remember that those in the NHS whom you abuse so freely would also like to enjoy the New Year but a lot of them will not.

Because of you the patient and the Party all of whom will be on call this New Year as politicians are every year picking up the puke, the abuse and the ill and doing nothing about it while they enjoy themselves.

Happy New Year to most NHS workers you deserve it. The time wasters deserve a good financial kick up the proverbial backside.

Praise be to the Party and the NHS for 60 years of treating drunken abusive b*****ds free at the point of delivery of care. Nye Bevin would have been proud.

Now we all have to be NICE?

What inspired this piece is an article in the GP magazine Pulse:

http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=23&storycode=4121395

where a Party organ has said that doctors must now follow NICE guidelines or face prosecution. An interesting phrase “guidelines” as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines them as “a directing or standardizing principle laid down as a guide to procedure policy etc”. It would appear that if the Pulse article is correct that guidelines have now become a Party diktat.

A lot of doctors ignore NICE as they feel they are politically and economically driven rather than scientifically driven. In Northernshire they are opened, the front cover scanned and then binned by and large and reference made to a variety of other sources journals, books and colleagues opinions before deciding on a particular treatment.

This is called being a doctor. As a doctor, rather than a Party organ, one considers the various options and applying what one thinks is best for a particular patient and their condition. However the Party knows best and if this idea is followed through patients will have any “choice” of treatment as long as it is black and NICE.

An example from the ND’s past experience may illustrate how this ill conceived idea would work in practice.

When ND was in the military, ND was stationed at a hospital that took part in the ISIS2 trial looking at clot busting drugs for heart attack patients. The trial was stopped early because the use of clot busting drugs was so much better than the existing treatments.

The senior medical officers at the base read the results of the trial and decided that it might be a good idea to stop the trial and treat all heart attack patients with the clot busting drugs. They went to see the commanding office at the hospital who was also a doctor, not a manager, and presented their view that the hospital should change treatments and he agreed after a short meeting and a review of all the evidence.

Thus within days of a major scientific trial being published this particular military hospital was one of the first in the State to use clot busting drugs long before many other neighbouring civilian hospitals did. This treatment has been is use now for almost 20 years throughout the world.

This is an example of doctors acting independently, considering the research and coming to a considered opinion before changing treatment for the better.

Now let us look at what would happen if NICE was the only treatment. We know that NICE considers things at a pace slower than a crushed slug can move so it would take months or years for them even to consider new research. Even if it did consider new research it would look at the economics probably have a political slant all of which could mean that something that worked might not be approved because of cost or Party interference.

So the result would be that the Party would approve and ration drugs even more than at present and medical innovation would be stifled by the fear of prosecution.

The Party and its comrade commissar managers rarely learn from history. Someone has not told them that the Berlin Wall has come down, the Cold War has ended and Communism in Europe is virtually non existent. Someone hasn’t told them that once centralized Party driven control was removed from the Eastern Bloc then countries with some of the worst health care systems in the world have risen up the league tables while the increasing centralisation of the NHS is one reason that it has slipped down health care leagues to be almost bottom.

We implore anyone reading this to think carefully about what the effect of Nicentralization would be on the NHS’s ability to offer cutting edge health care. We suspect it would end it and set back NHS care years at a single political stroke.

Let us hope that our faith in democracy and reason will over come the Party’s ill thought out centrally dictated policies that will ultimately harm patients and deny them “choice”.

Praise be to the Party for Gordon’s Little Green Book knows best.

Seasons Greetings

To any one who has read this blog we thank you for taking the trouble.

We wish everyone regardless of race, creed, country, color and gender a Happy Festive season. Illness and death do not discriminate neither do we.

ND and the team.

Respect.

Branson states the bleeding obvious

BBC News has reported that Sir Richard Branson has told the government how to cure the MRSA crisis. Once again it is the staff who are the sole source of this infection and they should be screened and if found to be carriers be treated although not sent home.

Funny how 20 years ago we used to do that and send people home until they were clear but then that became too expensive.

What can one say but stating the bloody obvious is now headline news. And it has taken how long for this to surface? Perhaps Sir Richard has a degree of medical knowledge closer to him then those at the Department of Health?

Praise be to the Party and its manager for winning the war on MRSA.

NHS Rangers lead the Way # 3 MRSA to be defeated in Scotland

In the far North of Northernshire there is a minor province that thinks it is a country. It has the right to determine certain aspects of its own fate and also the god given right to screw up the rest of the UK’s fate as its MPs are allowed to vote on English issues but the reverse does not apply. It has also given us Gord the Holy (beyond all others than Mugabe) a fine product of their limited education system.

While out driving ND did hear that staff in this minor province are to face the sack for not washing their hands.

Praise be to the Party for this. We now know that Scotland will be free of hospital acquired infection for the Party there have realized that the only source of hospital acquired infection is the staff. Not the patients or their bowels or their skin. Not their clothing or their coughs or noses or faeces or urine. Not the visitors and anything brought in from outside. No the root cause of ALL hospital infection is the staff.

This is clearly the state of knowledge at both Party Central UK and Party Central Scotland.

Given that 60% of men and 40% of women do not wash their hands after going to the toilet then sacking staff for not washing their hands will surely rid hospitals of all infection. Remember that all of those non handwashers will touch a door handle or something else while visiting a hospital that you as a patient or visitor may then touch. You will have nothing to fear from these people as they are free from disease it is only hospital staff that carry disease.

According to the BBC, whom some do regard as a Party organ, a spokesman for the Scottish Health Secretary said “The Scottish Government is to introduce a “zero tolerance” regime on hand hygiene for hospital staff in January”.

Does that mean that Scotland will be the first place in the United Kingdom to ban hand washing completely?

The link is hereif you are interested:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7794479.stm

Once again the NHS Ranger Corps (Scotland) show us how to lead onto victory. By concentrating on the minor skirmishes which will achieve nothing bar a sound bite they miss what should be the main thrust on the war on hospital acquired infections, the root cause – themselves and their policies.

Praise be to the Northern Rangers.

So Gord has saved the World did he in doing so forget the NHS?

So Gord the Holy made a fluff of his lines when he claimed to have saved the world by spending billions of tax payers money on propping up a banking system that had failed while on his watch as Chancellor and more latterly as Prime Minister.

Does anyone recall the famous phrase used by Gord’s friend Tony about 11 and half years ago the famous you have “24 hours to save the NHS”?

Anyone else see the similarities between the two scenarios? Both the NHS and banking system have been set up by or supervised in the recent past by the current ruling Party and its organs. Both have required billions of extra funding paid for by the taxpayer in order to keep them going and possibly to improve them?

I cannot answer the question as to whether this money has been used efficiently and improved things but I am sure 60 million of the British public will have their view as to whether this money has been well spent as they will be paying for it for years to come regardless of which party is in power.

So Gord has saved the World but seems to have forgotten the NHS. He has “saved” the world in weeks but what has he, and his Party, done in the past 11.5 years to the NHS?

You know you have a Broadband problem when:

ND although artistic by nature still appreciates the use of broadband technology and we are lucky enough to be able to avoid it for most of our working lives for example when in surgery.

ND is equally unlucky enough to use NHS broadband whose speeds rarely exceed dial up connections but then this must be because ND is in the North and miles from London where the NHS exchange is and we all know the further from the exchange you are the slower the speed is (according to the multitude of engineers who cannot fix the problem of speed but are getting paid to do nothing at our expense).

Whilst Patricia Hewitt and many other Party members are profiting from the crap NHS broadband system ND uses it daily to tell us when there is a problem at home. It is one of NDs’ laws:

It states that when your home broadband is slower than your NHS N3 connection speed you have a major problem.

Praise be to the Party and their ever wise and profitable excursion into IT. By providing so much to so few at huge costs to everyone bar themselves they have denied most to those that might be able to use it.

NHS Dentistry the Government reacts

After several years in power and changing NHS dentistry contracts it has been announced that there will be a review of NHS dentistry.

We at ND wonder how long this will take and what its conclusions will be?

Surely the truth as to who has created this mess is self evident to all apart from those ordering the review?

We await its august findings (next spring) with interest but doubt it will decrease our increased dental workload in general practice or in A&E. We do note that the review is being lead by a dentist. Surely that is a mistake? Would not a physiotherapist be better qualified in the same way that a surgeon can reform general practice?

NHS Rangers lead the Way - the War on MRSA #2

Another great tactic in the war on MRSA is copied from the Royal Navy but applied in disguise.

Grog was a mixture of rum and water issued on a daily basis to the Royal Navy for many years in order to improve sailors’ health and wellbeing.

For some unknown reason for centuries NHS staff have never washed their hands especially those who walk from the dissecting rooms and into the New Labour ward and so in an effort to encourage them to do so the NHS Ranger corps has placed Grog bottles at the bottom of every bed and at the entrances to wards and even attached them to nursing staff in devices called hip flasks.

This contains an alcoholic mixture of up to 20 % by volume which some patients find a very good source of free alcohol especially if you can get a 350ml bottle. Patients do not see the hygiene advantages of Grog but due to a trick of hospital fluorescent light will often see the 3 bottles of Grog on the left as something else (the 3 bottles on the right) in the above picture.

Grog is often placed in dispensers at the entrance to wards called optics (pictured bottom left) commonly seen behind bars in pubs (pictured bottom right for non UK readers) where the public avidly approach them to obtain relief from their worldly worries but in hospitals they are frequently ignored by visitors or empty due to theft as they do not look the same as the ones in pubs.

Grog - winning the war on MRSA and a lot more expensive than soap and water and hand washing.

Lead on NHS Rangers.

PS if you see the 3 bottles on the left the same as the ones on the right you may need help so please ring NHS Direct for urgent assistance but they cannot provide Grog (or medical care).

A public health message for our reader from the NHS Ranger corps.