Health of Gov’t Health Care: Lack of Water Forces Patients to Drink From Vases at UK Hospital
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| Hospital Bedside Glass of Water |
by Jonathon M. Seidl
Daily Mail
November 23, 2010
Thirsty patients at a British hospital were so desperate for care and especially water that they had to drink from flower vases, family members claim.
Julie Bailey, one such family member whose mother Bella died at the hospital in question, said patients were left “screaming” out in pain on chaotic and under-staffed wards at Stafford Hospital. When she approached the hospital about the matter, she said it told her it could not leave water out overnight due to “health and safety.”
Bailey told her story to a panel looking into the situation, the Daily Mail reports. But lack of water isn‘t Bailey’s only concern. She said her mother once collapsed after no staff were available to reconnect her disconnected oxygen supply. According to the Daily Mail, Baily is just one of many who are worried about the government-run hospital. The paper reports that “it has been claimed that hundreds of patients died at the hospital, run by Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, as a result of sub-standard treatment.” That “sub-standard“ treatment includes accusations of putting ”cost-cutting ahead of patient welfare.”
Baily set up an organization, Cure the NHS, to draw attention to the facility and government’s failing national health system (NHS). “The launch of the campaign,” the website says, “brought in many similar stories to ours. Their loved ones had been neglected or abused on those wards.”
~ ObamaCare MediScare Program ~
Donald Berwick, director of the United States' CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has claimed a love affair with Britain's NHS, National Health Services, and it's government-run program, the public-sector equivalent of K-Mart.
Berwick has also praised the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which had "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn."
“In America, the best predictor of cost is supply; the more we make, the more we use—hospital beds, consultancy services, procedures, diagnostic tests,” Dr. Berwick wrote. “… There, in the U.K., you choose a harder path. You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too little of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.”
Comparative-Effectiveness Research (CER) is the basis for the evaluation of methods of treatment and care between doctors and patients. In the Biotechnology interview, Dr. Berwick agrees that “mandatory compliance with CER directives could be dangerous, if you overdo the tightness of the connection between the knowledge of effectiveness and the rules of compliance. Then, you get into the ‘proletarianization’ of medicine — physicians, payers, and patients being told what to do instead of being able to use their own judgment. There’s a balance here between advisory declarations with enough knowledge that they really have some force, and requirements.”
"The more I have studied it, the more I believe that less discretion for doctors would improve patient safety," Berwick told the Boston Globe in 2004. "Doctors will hate me for saying that." This is where the "Death Panels" make the "Advisory Declarations" - whether you get treatment or not - live or die!
Dr. Berwick is a self-professed supporter of rationing health care. No one can not ignore his support for health care rationing and penchant toward "social justice" over medical quality.
Critics say his “love” and approach will eventually face the cost-cutting dilemma patients such as Julie Baily's mother have experienced first-hand.
“Any health care funding plan that is just equitable civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
~ Dr. Donald Berwick
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Patient Care Choices |
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