For me it’s been the loss of community hospitals that’s the biggest kick in the teeth. This needs reversing. I don’t know which government actually is mostly responsible nor do I care, I only care it is fixed because we need them or something equivalent.
No one would be discharged if they weren’t medically fit mate unless the situation is dire but I don’t think we really ever got that far but you might know of some specific examples so I won’t say it absolutely never happened.
Honestly mate I’m not defending the government on this one, but the NHS who it has been suggested deliberately discharged COVID patients to care homes and I can tell you they didn’t knowingly do so and we’re certainly under no Government instructions to do so either. I know first hand how these things can happen; Mrs MB moved one of her patients to a hospice who subsequently tested positive - you can imagine how she felt. The hospice closed it’s doors after that to visitors and new admissions. She was devastated and blamed herself. We can point to better testing and the such which would have helped but they’d still have been mistakes from staff on the ground.
Even in the best of times there is now pressure on beds. There is simply not enough of them and hospitals are closing wards because they either do not have the staff to man them or the financial resource to run them. Bed managers have to beg and borrow bed space on wards, sometimes wards that are ill equipped to deal with a patient but they have a spare bed. These become outlier patients who then take specialist nursing staff away from specialist wards because there are not enough specialist staff which leaves the specialist ward short of staff.
A strong matron will refuse a bed managers request if they want a patient moving but an inexperienced nurse may feel bullied into it such is the power of the bed managers. I have had a matron of mine chase a bed manager of the ward shouting some pretty choice language at him for trying to move me out of her care. Her answer was she is responsible for my well being, not the bed manager.
This leads to more pressure on Doctors to release patients early which invariably means the patient will be back in A&E in a matter of days, sometimes hours. They fear media scare stories of people waiting on trollies more than do releasing people early, only its like a merry go round and it is inefficient. A patient may end up having two 5 days stay rather than one 7 day stay and at around £400 per day per inpatient you can see how inefficient this becomes.
This is not new though, it happened when we had the swine flu outbreak. I ended up contracting it and because of the drugs i take it made me very ill, but for he first two days i ended up on a ward for spinal injuries as an outlier patient. Nurses from my specialist ward had to trek across the hospital to treat me and the ward i was on had none of the stuff that was needed to treat me.
The warning signs were there back then but nothing was done and wards continued to be closed and nurse number continued to fall exacerbated by the idiotic removal of the nursing bursary.
Lots of what has happened whilst this current pandemic is rife is a result of the short sightedness of austerity and the closure like you say of community hospitals. Even the big hospitals had to close wards. At Salford Royal a full ward was mothballed because it didn't have the staff or money to run it. It is the shortsightedness and obsession with outsourcing that has caused so many issues.
The moving of patients just passed the buck from the public sector to the private sector, it was a financial choice as much as a medical choice. Staff in care homes are cheaper but they dont have the anywhere near the same resources available that a hospital has. Dont get me wrong care homes are fine for healthy old people living out the final few years of there life, I know i worked in one for a while, but they are not hospitals.
Honestly, if Johnson had stood up and said "I am sorry, we got that wrong, please accept my humble apology" i think people would have accepted that because none of us are perfect and there is something more human about admitting failure. Johnson though will not admit he has failed, so he lies and more people get angrier with him because of it.
