NHS Prognosis

http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/this_is_why_the_prognosis_is_now_critical_for_our_nhs_1_4896132?platform=hootsuite

A very good article in The European on the critical state of our NHS.....The diagnosis based in my view of years of exposure to costly re-organisations. Re-organisations the result of being a political football with managers unable to long term plan because goal posts kept changing. Then cutbacks as you will see in the graph in the early 1990s and that is cutbacks on already underfunded budgets......... so putting extra money in simply only partially fills the hole.  A very complex situation on life expectations, demands made for treatments... the cost of drugs and therapies grossly inflated over the years.. yet reluctance to incorporate a more holistic way of caring.  Some wards and specialties have opened their wards and clinics to complementary practitioners and seen the value of reiki and aromatherapy and acupuncturist.. even as far back as the late 1980s therapeutic massage was seen as a value for cardiac patients.... There needs to be an investment of time for the patients with a more inter connected multi disciplinary approach...... this time will empower and help with well being and healing in many cases......

One thing for sure with my life being completely around the NHS from my father being a Charge Nurse and my career as a SEN RN RM BSc Nursing I have never ever seen the NHS so stress out.. There is no logic in cutbacks and closures of hospitals when the population is growing.  Each paying tax some how into the system.   Every person that puts a foot down on British soil starts to pay tax in VAT on goods and with all purchases and need for shelter and food and clothing.   The tax covers the cost of wages in the NHS and those wages are taxed so it all circulates back to the treasury and back out again -  so what is happening to all that money??? 

We do need to look at grossly inflated prices of goods and no matter how companies say "we put back into research" - one has to challenge when drugs are inflated to 300% real cost in some instances.  

We need more bed capacity and convalescence wards with improved community care...... to prevent the carousel patients coming round and round again with relapses simply because time was not invested in recovery and healing in the first place...

But my experience as a surgical patient with gross wound breakdown resulted in my readmission for septic shock ... and actually I did feel myself dying ... but as soon as I responded to the IV antiboitics the Grim reaper at the bottom of the bed turned into the Bed manager after my bed.. lol... 

I was discharged too early really but nursed myself at home with the help of the GP nurse down the road in the surgery and her weekend cover of a community nurse... A lovely old fashioned about to retire from nursing that said "if we cannot look after our own nurses where are we going with all this NHS....?!" 

She did a typical community nurse work planning on the Sunday morning of that week.. Knocked at my door to say go have a shower Marjorie and open your dressing pack ... I am off round to a patient in the next street then will be back to pack your wounds and do your dressing.... !

But I had most of the time to pack my own wounds and do my dressings... something that Mrs J Bloggs could not have done.  Even me the nurse laying in bed had to buck up courage to stand in front of the mirror and pack deep cavernous wounds... but when I opened the dressing pack the nurse in me would kick into play and I would sort my dressings out... then I had to go on Vac therapy to help stimulate granulation of new tissue to fill the cavernous wounds.... this was a good therapy but i was constantly reminded of the cost of it ....!! I had to remind the staff haggling over whose budget it should go on that over my years working I had paid in tax and NI contribution to cover the cost... and it was not right to have me laid with gaping wounds in pain and with the smell of necrotic tissue to be haggling over the £$£$£$£$ of my treatment.  A treatment that actually was cost effective and reduced the healing time... 

So complex is this subject of the NHS and cares.....I could go on an on... lol 

But readers if you can get a copy of Michael Wynne's WHO CARES play you will see more of Marjorie and her voice on the NHS. I was one of the interviewees that he used in his dialogue on the NHS of Who Cares...