Moley said:
This has been on the cards for along time now and there were rumours of it well before Summara left. It is not a viable hospital and in general the care is hit and miss, positive experiences of the place are purely based on luck and how busy, how well staffed any department providing the care is at the time.
This is something that people really need to think about. Everybody would like to see a viable hospital survive in Stafford but surely not at any cost. If the choice were reduced down to being a) treated badly in a convenient location, or b) treated well in an inconvenient one, i’m guessing most people would go for option b).
Interesting (as always)
Medicine Balls in the
Eye, asking why Cameron has ‘decided to go to war’ with the NHS, which poses relevant questions to the viability of Stafford Hospital;
M.D. said:
Labour’s massive drive for “world-class commissioning” was a belly flop, not because frontline staff were excluded, but because the NHS doesn’t measure and compare outcomes to allow meaningful choices. If you buy a suit, you can feel the width and take it back if it falls apart. It’s harder to do that with a breast implant. So the NHS just buys the cheapest and hopes it doesn’t burst. The PIP scandal is an extreme example of what happens when you compete on cost … without paying attention to quality…
…If the NHS is going to compete, it has to compete on getting patients better, not balancing the books by fobbing breast cancer patients off with cheap silicon meant for mattresses.
Now for ‘cost’ read ‘convenience’. Emotive as the whole issue is for the people of Stafford, the leaked letter posted by Unlikelysuspect essentially exposes the doubts the CCG’s have about the ability of the hospital to provide care outside of the four areas outlined. Much as we would like it to be able to ‘compete’, if it can’t then what is the point of supporting it? It would be great to have a fully functioning hospital on our doorstep, but as Moley points out, if the people who work there wouldn’t want to be treated there, then why on earth would you?
I’d just like to add on the following paragraph from M.D.’s article, it might remind you of someone;
Measuring (outcomes) is not the only solution. An open, transparent culture that ensures management act on poor outcomes rather than deny it, as in Mid Staffs, is equally vital. At present, the best smoke alarm in the NHS is patients, relatives and staff speaking up when they encounter appalling care, yet the brutal suppression of whistleblowers (Eyes passim ad nauseam) shows how much NHS culture needs to change.