UK Death Certificates hide a truth?

Anyone that watched the latest Real Story program on the BBC yesterday cannot have helped to have been affected by the contents of the program. Clearly there is a level of cover up going during the completion of death certificates with the substituting of real causes of death by general illness descriptions.

As the program points out, it's very strange that despite serious concerns by Doctors, hospital acquired infections such as MRSA or Clostridium Difficile don't seem to feature in death certificates. Nor does diabetes which many doctors think is reaching epidemic proportions.

I am aghast at some of the figures mentioned during the program - Government reports show that 45% of all UK Death Certificate are wrong! - hopefully the recent announcement for changes for coroners courts will go some way to correcting some of these errors, but more needs to be done, urgently.
While individual and overworked junior doctors are 'dumped' on by their senior colleagues to 'fill-in' the details with in some cases bland descriptions of death, there are still going to be a very high 'error-rates' with the accuracy of death certificates.

Tags: MRSA, Clostridium Difficile

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What! - New NHS Job losses pushes total over 16,000 mark!

New announcements by NHS trusts have pushed the Job Loss total over 16,000 for the first time. This includes the first announcement of job losses in NHS Dentistry by the Oxford PCT that they will be cutting their staff levels in this area. The new Job Losses total is now 16,025! The Bed Loss total remains at a total of 1,227.

Tags: NHS, Dentistry, Oxford

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A step too far!!

Sometimes I wonder at the thinking behind some of decisions emanating from the NHS. The latest announcement about the outsourcing of the work done by Medical Secretaries seems to me, to be a dangerous decision.

There have been a number of articles in the main press relating to potential disastrous consequences from this decision including a Daily Mail article detailing what could happen.

Yes there is a need to get the NHS budget deficit sorted out, yes there is a need to get all costs sorted out, yes there is a need to be more cost-effective, but the major remit of the NHS surely is to repair and save lives. Any decision based solely on cost saving that has a potential to affect the medical well-being of the patient or the process of care due to the patient is wrong.

Tags: NHS, Medical, Secretary

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Some intersting cost saving issues!!

Catching up with an overdue backlog of items for this blog, I caught an announcement by the Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust about some of its methods for costs savings to get its £5.2 million budget deficit under control.

Some of the items to be addressed include having in-patients pay for their own newspapers and scrapping the on-site hair dressing service. Money has already been made by re-negotiating the hospitals' laundry service and taxi contract services (from what I have seen, some taxi companies have made small fortunes out of their NHS contracts), all very good ideas for saving money.

However, I think I am not sure about the suggestion that in-patients will only get one hot meal a day instead of two! This will surely affect the patients well-being. The trust is also considering the introduction of car parking charges for hospital visitors.

This last point I totally disagree with. Having someone in hospital is stressful enough - I can personally vouch for this - but having to make sure that you have a enough money to pay for car parking charges and worrying about 'clamping' is something that I think hospital visitors do not need.

Tags: NHS, Car Parking, Stress, Budget

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NHS deficit now over £500m.

With figures released today, the NHS deficit has now risen to £512m for 2005-2006. That's more than double the previously audited year 2004-2005.

Interestingly, if the surplus made by the Strategic Health Authorities (SHA's) had not been included in the overall figures, then the deficit would have been a mind blowing £1,000m or £1bn! We will look into these figures to see if we gain any more info to explain them.

Immediate information on the overview to this story can be found at the BBC web site, also included is a link to a postcode search, which will allow you to find out how your local PCT / Trust is doing with surplus / deficit figures listed.

If you want to find out how other area PCT / Trusts are doing, you can use this link to search by area.

More on this as the story unfolds.

Tags: NHS, SHA's, PCT's, Trusts

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Some sense at last?

Interesting news seen in the last few days that NHS managers may have stumbled on a very practical (and to us obvious) way of cutting back on the ever increasing costs to the NHS. Cut back on agency nursing costs!

The Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust seems to be the first NHS Trust to adopt this method of cost cutting and will cut some 300 agency jobs by April 2007. This, say the trust will help not make any permanent nursing staff redundant!

This news of course comes with a sting in its tail! They won't be able to recruit new permanent staff to fill the nursing positions that will be lost and we are sure that this will have an affect patients.

Unless of course they then decide to close hospital beds, because of staff shortages!!!!

What a mess!

More beds to go in the NHS!

According to the a statement (see Guardian article) by the shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley another 1,000 beds will disappear from the the NHS as it tries to cope with the ongoing 'Budget Deficit' problems. Of course, the government Health Minister Andy Burnham has accused Andrew Lansley of partisan politics and 'increasing the noise' about the NHS.

Out take on this, Andrew Lansley has underestimated the number of beds that will be lost and Andy Burnham is just doing what he's told to do by the government.

We think the number of beds that will be lost this year will be very significant as the NHS diverts money for bed occupancy to relieve some of the budget deficit issues.

More developments on this subject? We are sure...