Older people who spend time in hospital are being discharged suffering from long-lasting incontinence because NHS staff are too busy to take them to the toilet while they're on the ward, experts warn.
One reason, say specialists, is inappropriate use of urinary catheters – a tube inserted into the urinary tract which empties the contents of the bladder into a drainage bag. There are strict criteria for who should have one fitted, including those with existing urinary incontinence and patients unable to move due to having undergone a major operation or suffering spinal or pelvic injuries.
But research has revealed that on some wards the procedure has become almost standard practice.And why? Because it makes the staff's job easier...
Is there an institution in the UK that isn't letting down the people it's there to help?
Idle couldn't give a toss staff and tick box medicine where everything is for the convenience of the hospital and not the benefit of the patient. Ain't the NHS grand. No wonder no other nation copied the NHS model.
ReplyDeleteI took my mother to Guy's on Thursday for a dental procedure, and the staff themselves were utterly fantastic. But the bureacracy required....
Delete"Is there an institution in the UK that isn't letting down the people it's there to help?" A 'QTWTAIN' if ever I saw one!
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
DeleteI don't know the legal implications but it seems to me, from experience with my mother, that was soon as someone is considered an inpatient, they lose all of their rights and are essentially incarcerated in a totalitarian institution.
ReplyDeleteI've told my relatives that will have to be on death's door before I want to be taken to hospital.
I think the German for hospital is Krankenhaus; ie the sick house and that's probably more appropriate for our hospitals. Many in the medical industry seem to be Kranken these days to me.
My mother is of the same opinion. And that's before you consider the fact that before they'd even consider admitting her to a care home, they'd look to see what assets she had that they could get their greedy hands on..
DeletePrior to being driven out of the profession I was once taken aside, by multiple patients, on an elderly care ward and thanked for spending time with a (labelled) ‘difficult’ patient (with advanced Parkinsons, unable to see or speak, who understandably ‘lashed out’ when moved suddenly without warning) for spending time, explaining what I was about to do and ‘chatting to him like to a normal person’ (FFS!) as I cared for him. (As a direct result I was never offered a shift on that ward again, as I had shown the other staff in a bad light primarily by having a registered nurse actually doing some hands-on patient care for a change, and became literally persona non grata there).
ReplyDeleteIt was at that point, merely doing my job, doing something that any normal person with even an ounce of humanity left in them would do, seeing that even transient patients noted how unusual it was, that I realised just how far the profession had fallen.
The whole ethos of a vocation, service and care has long been corrupted and exchanged for one of career, status/money and ‘getting away with doing as little as possible, preferably by fobbing any work off onto ‘unqualified, usually foreign, menials’.
The simple fact is there are ‘almost’ (only qualified as I don’t know every nurse, but I’ve worked in multiple hospitals, in multiple cities) no ‘caring professionals’ left.
When you realise that patients are, even when not given unnecessary and in fact contraindicated catheterisation, but routinely put in pads, not for their benefit, but to limit the number of times the staff ‘have’ to take them to a toilet, you may have ‘begun’ to see the real truth of the profession.
As a (now former) nurse of decades experience, I have told friends and family that should I become ill, or even have an accident outside a hospital main gate, I wish, demand, that they return me home rather than allow admission. That ‘should’ tell you all you need to know about the ‘vaunted’ NHS.
It’s much like the uncounted Americans I know who ‘still’ perceive Britain based on the views their fathers/grand-fathers had of the austere wartime country. The NHS exits off the, mostly misinterpreted or outright wrong, memory of something that no longer exists (and probably never really did).
Burn it to the ground, and salt the remains, it is beyond fixing.
We were really lucky at Guy's. Luckier than we've been in local hospitals, for certain.
DeleteI trained at The Free, and worked years at Kings, Mary’s and (F-grade in A&E, Medical Admissions, ITU and CCU at) Guy’s & St. Thomas’ (Yes, I got about a bit, although colleagues would probably suggest exchanging got for put it. Ah, to be young, free and single once again!).
DeleteAccording to former colleagues, even G&T is ‘luck of the draw’ now (it, and the others, remained almost immune for years, both by being high status, attracting the best and brightest, and … because so many US, Australian, Kiwi and Canadian nurses work temp there, so ‘forcing’ some level of “competitive development” to occur – standards only maintained to show ‘the colonials’ we still could. ‘Rumours’ suggest the current ‘fad’ of replacing them all with ‘third world’ staff is … not working out well).
But, I'm so old I still remember G&T having only one Matron (and she still gives me nightmares even now) in the dim and distant past of ... the nineties (that's 19, not 18 in case you wondered).
"Is there an institution in the UK that isn't letting down the people it's there to help?"
ReplyDeleteNo, they're all just taking the p1$$.