Medical Treatment in England, Or, Lack Of

[poboy]

http://tinyurl.com/387m4s

A TRAGIC dad died of cancer after doctors failed to spot the disease during FIFTY hospital visits.

This is truly sad.

[kramer]

Also, better make sure that they approve of your lifestyle before expecting treatment:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...2/nsmoke12.xml

Kramer

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, has given her blessing to the policy of denying operations to smokers until they kick the habit.

Endorsing a position adopted by some health trusts, the minister also voiced support for doctors who order patients to lose weight before treatment.

Mrs Hewitt said she backed the increasing number of doctors who make decisions about whether it is appropriate and safe to operate on smokers, or patients who are significantly overweight.

"What I've been seeing. . . is more and more health centres and GP practices focussing on that kind of support," she told The Sunday Times.

"They will say to patients, you shouldn't have this operation until you've lost a bit of weight and stopped smoking."

However, she added that it would be "dreadful" to deny treatment on the basis that patients were to blame for their condition.

Hip and knee replacements are among the operations likely to be denied to those who are overweight, while smokers could miss out on heart bypasses.

The Health Minister's views on the issue, which mirror those of a growing number of medical experts, are based on what she describes as "best practice" – because operations are less likely to be successful when the patient is very fat or a heavy smoker.

However, some doctors have expressed concern that the stance could be used by some NHS trusts as a means of saving money, while others have questioned the criteria that will be used to judge an appropriate weight for surgery.

However, Prof Leonard Glantz, of Boston University School of Public Health, in Massachusetts, said: "It is shameful for doctors to be willing to treat everybody but smokers in a society that is supposed to be pluralistic and tolerant."

. . .

Smokers, however, described the policy as blackmail, pointing out that they pay taxes along with non-smoking citizens.

[Leonidas]

Free government health care - such a deal. There were related stories linked to from the Sun story on the undiagnosed dad. Fun quotes here

...his mother had to wait two days to receive sufficient treatment for the infection as the hospital had 'run out' of a special scrub and ointment.

Pat Roberts, who uses a wheelchair, was away from the packed NHS ward for less than 20 minutes.

But that was enough time for nurses to strip her bed, re-make it and give it to a new arrival.

Disabled Pat, 68 — who had only been in the bed for 90 minutes anyway — protested about the mix-up but was forced to sit in her wheelchair for four-and-half hours.

THE father of a toddler who died after a four-hour wait in a hospital A&E has blasted medics for "taking no notice" of his son’s failing health.

Ahil Islam, aged one, was taken to hospital in Watford, Herts, by ambulance after developing a fever following a minor burn when a cup of tea was spilled over him.

On their arrival, his parents said they expected him to be rushed to a ward for treatment but instead he was kept waiting in A&E.

He died four hours later.

But a report by the Healthcare Commission out today says similar failings are repeated across the health service.

In one unidentified hospital, relatives were shown the WRONG corpse — while in another, an injection was given to the WRONG child.

40,000 employees being laid off, NHS costs skyrocketing, complaints of poor treatment increased 4% last year and they've developed all kinds of neat deadly infections that are killing off hospital patients. Doctors refuse to treat patients who "complain too much", and they're anticipating being 2,200 doctors short from the minimum needed. And the NHS is 4 Billion in the red. Oh, let's follow this model!

[mykidslovedogs]

The thing is that universal care works great for quite a few years and will seem like heaven in the SHORTRUN, but once $$ starts running low, several years OR decades down the road, that's when you start seeing these kinds of problems. Problem is, Americans always want an instant fix to the problem.

Capitalistic solutions (like tax incentives) work well, but sometimes, it takes a few years for the positive effects to start becoming noticeable (like with HSAs), but very few Americans want to wait that long! HSAs are gaining a lot of popularity, but it is definately taking some time to teach people to understand how they work and how to utilize the insurance properly.

On the other hand, universal care or single payor solutions will have an immediate effect of covering lots of uninsured people and negative consequences will not be noticeable for many years down the road. The short sightedness of those who favor a single payor system scares me!

[Caroline]

http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/i...story=20020131

You don't need government health care to get this level of quality -- we have it right here in the U.S. of A.!

According to a 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine, as many as 98,000 people die each year in hospitals from medical errors.

[Oldbabe]

Originally Posted by Caroline

http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/i...story=20020131

You don't need government health care to get this level of quality -- we have it right here in the U.S. of A.!

This is true. I have heard and read about many horror stories occurring at the best hospitals in the USA. And I have experienced waiting in a hospital ER with my former husband who was in severe stomach pain for two hours for no apparent reason. I guess they were waiting to see if he passed out before taking him to the examining room.

When I took my young daughter to a very fine Children's Hospital ER in the evening we waited for several hours for her to get a x-ray for a broken elbow.

I could go on and on.

[lets-retire]

Originally Posted by Caroline

http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/i...story=20020131

You don't need government health care to get this level of quality -- we have it right here in the U.S. of A.!

The big difference is in our current system if a doctor messes up you can sue them and cause them to go out of business. When they are employed by the government, you can sue the government and hope they fire the doctor.

[mykidslovedogs]

ER waiting times in the USA have several root causes:

1.) Uninsured people use it for primary care, because they know they will get care for "free" (at the expense of taxpayers.)
Possible Solutions we can work towards:
- Work to get more people insured through tax incentives
- Educate people about programs like the child healthcare programs for those who make
too much income to qualify for Medicaid. (many people who are elgible for these
programs do not even know they exist. (I just taught one of my clients about
CHP+ yesterday. She had no idea the program was even available to her family.

2.) Insured people use it (ER) for non-emergency situations, because the only penalty is a low copay.
Possible Solutions:
- Continue to create incentives such as lower premiums and tax savings for those who
opt for consumer-driven health plans like HSAs. People on these kinds of plans will
learn to use urgent care facilities instead of ER for non-emergencies such as strep
throat, high fevers in little children, and skin lesions, as they will discover that urgent
care facilities cost about 1/2 as much as ER.

Primary Care wait times are primarily caused by lack of supply of doctors and too many people to service who are on Medicaid and Medicare. Fewer and fewer doctors are choosing primary care careers, because the pay is too low due to government price controls on Medicaid and Medicare coverage. The more people we have covered on government programs, the worse the problem will become.

[DRiP Guy]

Perhaps these guys have come across the solution both to current high costs and to efficacy: Use Gamers sitting in dad's basement!

Neither years of training nor number of surgeries performed would predict performance on the laparoscopy skills test. Past gaming and current skills, in contrast, would. Those who had never gamed took significantly longer to complete the skills test, and had an error rate of roughly 1.5 times that of regular gamers. Similar correlations also held when gaming skills were tested: those scoring in the top third made nearly 50 percent fewer errors, and and performed the drill nearly 40 percent faster. For those keeping score at home, Super Monkey Ball 2 had the best correlation with surgical skills, Star Wars Racer Revenge the worst.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8881.html