“https://www.icelandreview.com/sci-tech/icelands-coronavirus-testing-global-pandemic-response/”
Link to very informative article on Icelandic Review Online.
PS My only experience of an NHS hospital, was very clean, very efficient, good fresh food, and very fast response on my arrival at A&E at 04.00 on a Sunday morning. Drove myself there with severe breathing problems and was kept in. Dr Gray’s Hospital, Elgin, March and again in April. 2017.
The funding may be nominally separate but in the UK there is only one “NHS” so isn’t it the same thing really?
Perhaps it’s splitting hairs, and I think they still fall under the Department of Health and Social Care, but they have separate budgets and administrations.
Two other aspects of healthcare which are administered separately are sexual health clinics and social services. The latter is important because we often have patients who need nursing homes. This is down to social services to sort out, but it is cheaper for them if a patient stays in hospital at £500 a night than a nursing home at £1000 a week so there is an incentive to make the process as complex as possible and drag their feet. This is a big contributor to long hospital stays whilst people wait for discharge. And GUM clinics have been cut back even when increases in funding for the NHS are announced.
Why is it important? I think one should be careful only to hold people to account for the things they have responsibility for. Whoever pays for stockpiles of PPE, it is not usually individual hospital managers who are responsible for their shortage as they are doled out centrally.
I am baffled as to why we are making so many ventilators when it seems unlikely we will be able to staff them properly. Are bin liners or polythene sheets still made outside of China? If so then how difficult would it be to repurpose the factories to make aprons? A drive to produce oxygen concentrators might have been more useful than a drive to produce ventilators.
My experience with the NHS is just the opposite of Jacko’s, although it was some years before.
When I was 15, I had quite a nasty accident (basically, my hand went through an old glass door, and the glass cut my wrist and everything in it apart from half of one tendon).
The care I received was exemplary: the place where it happened (Worcester) the Worcester Royal Infirmary immediately realised they couldn’t deal with it, and sent me to Birmingham, where I had nearly 7 hours of microsurgery. I stayed in the hospital in Birmingham for a couple of weeks in a ward mostly full of industrial accidents. The care we all received was top rate. After leaving the hospital, as an outpatient, I was provided with 3 hours per day physiotherapy Mondays-Fridays, and a check up with the consultant every Friday. This went on for about 2 months.
The surgery repairs were to all tendons in my right hand, arteries, nerves. At the time they were using new techniques, they told my parents had I done this just a couple of years earlier I would have probably lost the use of my right hand.
When I had my first aviation medical in the USA about 10 years later, this was all disclosed on the medical form. The American doctor remarked “they did a really good job on this” when I described the injury and what was done.
My right hand has entirely normal function, and is my dominant hand – so I write with it, hold a soldering iron with it, play the piano etc. It wasn’t merely a result of the skill of the surgeons who made the initial treatment, but the management afterwards and the quite intense physiotherapy.
If the NHS has gone down hill it’s due to political choice, not the fact it’s a public service. The US-style alternative is extremely inefficient: on a per-capita basis, just the cost of providing insurance is nearly the entire per-capita cost of the NHS. What the NHS did for me would have been well over $1 million worth of work in the US in today’s money and probably not covered by anything other than really good insurance.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
The answer is every country that wishes must sign up to a new agreement that they undertake to make immediate disclosure should this occur again (as it will) and the WHO will send in independent inspectors (the same principle as weapons of mass destruction). Any country can dissent, but the reprecussions would be immediate and severe – no flights can land from that country, borders sealed, ships not permitted to enter ports. I doubt many countries would not agree to sign up and a period of isolation / severe embargos would bring them to account. You can imagine the US, Europe the UK for starters would be up for that.
YES.
I think your post makes a lot of sense and yes, this is the way things have to go after this disaster.
So they really are extraordinarily brave.
I hope not. For the NHS workforce to get anywhere near the top of the UK’s work-related fatality rate, their 2020 death toll will have to rise to about 140. That will be a scandal without precedent.
I would say that like workers in agriculture, construction, manufacturing and transport (to name the “top four”) they are “just” doing the job they love as well as they can.
Unfortunately NHS workers are constrained by a socialist institution which is intensely hostile to and fearful of the private sector. So in month 4 of this crisis, they still can’t protect themselves or test their own colleagues for the CCP-virus.
Supermarkets in the UK are paying bonuses to their staff and allowing pregnant workers paid leave.
However, one of our nurses is 25 weeks pregnant and has been told that she must resign or continue to work until week 28. Our healthcare assistants are already often on lower salaries than some of the figures quoted for supermarket workers but are not expecting a pay rise despite the currently risky nature of their work.
Spare a thought for these people who do the brunt of the heavy lifting in the NHS.
I hope not. For the NHS workforce to get anywhere near the top of the UK’s work-related fatality rate, their 2020 death toll will have to rise to about 140.
I believe 69 doctors have already died in Italy. It’s hard to know what to make of that figure as so many people have died you would expect it to include a certain number of working doctors. But as most deaths have been in older people and most doctors are of working age, it is significantly more than you would expect. Some specialities such as anaesthetists will bear the most risk.
Nobody seems to be reporting the numbers of nurses or other healthcare staff who have died. Just individuals mentioned here and there.
I’ve seen both good and bad in the NHS, some terrible.
The NHS seems to be treated as a new religion or cult which I find very odd. There are plenty of Scandals and the Mid Staffs trust was particularly unpleasant.
I’m pleased people are doing their jobs, something they’ve chosen to do which is pretty well paid and with a tremendous pension.
I wonder what “nurse” Pilgrim is doing now? I don’t know the details but are those nurses and folk paid full salaries by the NHS but doing full time union work coming do their actual job?
So the new rumor is that BCG vaccine against tuberculosis reduces effects of coronavirus infection. This vaccine is mandatory at birth in some poorer countries, also Eastern Bloc (yay!). Australia is planning to vaccinate 4000 medical personel in a trial.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-could-tb-vaccine-offer-protection
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/fewer-coronavirus-deaths-seen-in-countries-that-mandate-tb-vaccine
What do we make in the UK (and elsewhere) of this idea mooted yesterday by Hancock of a “I have had it – passport”? I see it fraught with some many issues.
