Barton finally buggers off-after piss poor GMC lets her stay

Morphine Moll and Bill Oddie look alike “Dr” Jane Barton has it seems asked to be removed from the Piss Poor GMC’s medial register.

Morphine Moll’s too little too late decision comes after a GMC hearing last year found she prescribed ‘excessive’ drugs to elderly patients but decided not to remove her from the register and instead placed conditions on her licence. Relatives of patients who died at the hospital under Dr Barton’s care have since been asked to give their views on her asking to be removed from the register.

But families are confused about why the GP, who last year retired from Forton Medical Centre in Gosport, has chosen to make the request now.

They are not the only ones, what “confuses” me most is why the Piss Poor GMC is still in being, it doesn’t exactly have a clean record when it comes to “disciplining” well connected doctors who can kill and maim at will and walk away with income and pension intact, while patients and their relatives suffer both physically and mentally for the rest of their lives as they see murdering quacks carry on killing and maiming.

Hasn’t the time to bury the festering, inbred, gold plated load of Tossers that can’t seem to tell the difference between justice and “Justice”, patients take a poor second/third/fourth place behind the needs and careers of those who know the right people.

And hasn’t the time come to allow patients and relatives to sue the so called “Doctors” personally with the help of legal aid, after all we pay for the NHS, we pay the Doctors salaries we should be able to get some redress when “they” cock it up, without having to  resort to the archaic and medieval so called NHS “complaints” system which as we all know is so biased toward Doctors and Hospitals that it isn’t really worth the effort of spending years of your life only to see the cover ups and white wash brushes come out. And a final thought: why not allow us to sue the CEOs as well.

Angus

Another round up-sort of.

Real life is still impinging on blogging time, so once again a quick whizz through the “news”.



I suppose that everyone has heard about the Woman who has had to sell her home to pay for cancer treatment, probably old news by now but it does make you think about “what is important” to the pointy heads at the DOH, and NIHCE (NICE).

Prolonging terminally ill patients’ lives obviously isn’t high enough on the agenda.



And Reform seems to think that cutting a quarter of Hospital beds will “save money and improve care”, it said advances in technology and rising rates of conditions like diabetes meant the focus should shift towards more community services.

The government said local health chiefs could decide, while the British Medical Association said cuts made for purely financial reasons would be "immoral".

The hospital bed count has been falling for decades, but Reform's call represents a more rapid programme than has been seen in recent years.

There were just under 300,000 beds in 1987, but by last year that had fallen to 160,000 as advances in treatment have meant patients do not need to spend as long in hospital.

They also seem to think that fewer Hospitals and more competition is what we need in our NHS.



They obviously all have private healthcare, and does that mean that as beds are decreasing the “Management” salaries will decrease in proportion, after all there will be less work to do.





And apparently we don’t believe what the “experts” tell us regarding ‘cancer scares’, no surprises there then, blackdog as usual explains it all in his usual clear and understandable fashion.



The knobs have finally decided that the system of vetting “foreign” Doctors needs ‘improving’, Urgent changes must be made to the system of vetting foreign doctors offering out-of-hours GP care, MPs say.

The Health Committee warned NHS trusts "were not doing their jobs" by failing to check language and medical skills.

That meant patients risked being treated by doctors who were incompetent or were not fluent in English.

Lives were at risk due to a reliance on overseas doctors in weekend and night GP shifts, the MPs said. The government said improvements were being made.

There are no exact figures for how many foreign doctors are employed for out-of-hours work, although ministers said in evidence to the committee that it was a "limited" problem.



So how do they know it is a “limited” problem? Limited to what? How many people go to the media and tell their “horror stories”? Or limited to the amount of information that their one brain cell can contain.

Tell that to David Gray, oh sorry they can’t because Mr Gray was killed by a “foreign” Doctor who was incompetent and couldn’t speak English.



And last but certainly not least:



The “Powers that be” have a small problem, well actually it is a bloody great big one; The NHS has more than 34 million unused doses of swine flu vaccine despite agreeing deals to break its contracts.

The UK government had signed deals with two firms - Baxter and GlaxoSmithKline - for more than 120m doses of the jabs.

But just 44m will now be bought as cases have petered out since December. Of these, 6m have already been used and 3.8m is being sent to help Africa.

Estimates have put the value of the stockpile at between £100m to £150m; although the government has refused to confirm cost saying it was commercially confidential.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: "I am pleased we have reached an agreement that is good value for the taxpayer and means that the department has retained a strategic stockpile to protect the UK population without incurring a cancellation fee."



“Good value for the taxpayer”, interesting statement from Andy Burnham and how many nurses would £125 million pay for?



Angus

Collaberative care

Finally managed to find some time for a “proper” post, came across this whilst trawling the web.

From Pulse

Depressed? You will be after you have read this, first we had Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), then they tacked on Computer Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CCBT or CBBC as I like to call it), now we have “Collaborative Care” which I suppose you could call CCCBT, it was developed in the US – a form of enhanced consultation liaison, whereby input into general practice by mental health experts is facilitated through specially trained case managers.

Essential elements of these programmes are the use of evidence-based protocols for treatment, structured collaboration between primary care providers and mental health specialists, active monitoring of adherence to treatment and of outcomes, and in some cases structured programmes of psychotherapy delivered in primary care.

Collaborative care involves trained and competent workers who manage high volumes of patients, are supervised by mental health specialists and link with GPs to provide regular feedback on the progress of an individual patient.

A great deal of evidence has been amassed in the US on this quality improvement method and recently three small trials have shown that positive results could also be achieved here in the UK.

Great, you may think, but look at the reasoning behind this Telephone Therapy-Despite the proven efficacy of pharmacological and talking treatments, patient compliance with both is poor. One of the problems with talking treatments is that they tend to be offered in very traditional ways, mainly face to face with therapists using weekly ‘golden hour’ sessions. This limits the numbers of patient’s counsellors and therapists can treat and many patients find the need to take time off work every week an insurmountable barrier.

According to Professor David Richards GPs have very limited options available when faced with patients consulting about common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. NICE guidelines state that cognitive behaviour therapy is as effective as some drug treatments and recommend all suitable patients be offered such treatment.

But best estimates are that overall GPs are able to access talking treatments for only 9% of their patients, with fewer than 2% receiving CBT.

In a recent clinical research protocol developed by a team funded through the Medical Research Council, case managers supported patients with depression in primary care using a 6:1 ratio of telephone versus face-to-face contacts. The workers delivered a mixture of medication support – mainly regarding antidepressants – and a form of low-intensity CBT for depression called behavioural activation.(5)

On average, patients in the case-managed group showed twice the improvement compared with a control group. The total additional time spent treating each patient was very modest – on average slightly more than three hours per patient in total over a 12-week period.

Interviews with patients were extremely positive, particularly regarding the use of the phone, providing they had at least one initial face-to-face appointment.

With PCTs now focused very much on patient choice and access, GPs and practice teams may find the arguments easy to make.

Most patients value the flexibility of telephone working – indeed, in one classic recent case study, a mental health worker was able to treat a patient over the telephone during his lunch break while the patient sat in his JCB, allowing him to undergo a full treatment programme without disturbing his very real need to function undisturbed at his workplace.

Although telephone working will not suit all patients, current evidence and experience is indicating that telephone support and treatment is effective, acceptable and a cost-effective way of redressing the parlous state of access to non-drug treatments for the majority of people with anxiety and depression.

 

A bit like the Swine Flu helpline then, let your fingers do the walking and some invisible “therapist” do the talking.

 

Angus

Cash at the top

This sad tale comes from my local “Foundation trust”:

 The boss of Frimley Park Hospital was awarded an inflation-busting 6.5% pay increase last year, taking his annual pay above £175,000.

Andrew Morris, the hospital’s chief executive, was given the pay hike despite the fact that nurses and low-paid staff at the hospital, which employs 2,972 people, were given rises of just 2.5% in the same year.

His raise was made up of an increase of 3.5% in salary, with a bonus payment of £5,000 for hitting a number of performance targets, the hospital’s annual report showed.

Mr Morris has also built up a personal pension pot worth more than £1.5m.

The figures come as a report by public sector pay experts Income Data Services showed that boardroom pay in the health service had doubled in the past decade – faster than the average rise seen in public sector pay.

"Testing times"

Steve Tatton, editor of the report, said: “These are undoubtedly testing times for those making decisions about how much to pay NHS chiefs, balancing recruitment and motivation against the need to keep tight control of the public purse, but it seems that the equation has fallen on the side of high salary awards."

Frimley Park’s own pay policy for top executives, published as part of its annual report, suggested that its executives should be awarded a pay rise every year in excess of that given to bosses at other hospitals.

Mike Jackson, from public sector union Unison, representing nurses and healthcare staff, said: “It is not right for senior staff to get above inflation pay hikes, while the rest of the workforce get a below inflation pay deal.”

Frimley Park Hospital said election rules meant it could not comment publicly about the pay increases.

But Denis Gotel, a patient governor at the hospital, said he thought the public got good value for money out of Mr Morris and that the boss commanded respect from all the hospital's staff.

"He's worth every penny," Mr Gotel said.

 

Bollocks “Mr” Gotel, the front line staff are worth every penny, the CEO is taking the piss, and the money, I know, I have “met” him a few times.

 

Angus

The BMJ and mortality rates

It seems that the BMJ (British Medical Journal) has decided in its wisdom that Death rates are a poor measure of hospital care and should not be used to trigger public inquiries.

The British Medical Journal analysis argued the figures were a "poor test of quality" and urged inspectors to rely on other measures instead.

It contrasts with the pressure mounting on the Care Quality Commission to pay more attention to death rates produced by Dr Foster, a private research group.

The NHS regulator said death rates were just one part of the armoury.

 

The two experts in disease monitoring, Professor Richard Lilford, from Birmingham University, and Peter Pronovost, from Johns Hopkins University in the US, criticised the way death rates were used to castigate Stafford Hospital over the past year.

 

So what figures do the “experts” suggest we use? Maybe the number of patients that leave hospital and die at home? Which can be arranged by astute trusts, ship them out before they die so that they are not included, or maybe the total of complaints, that can take years to complete, many of which are abandoned by complainants because of the biased system that allows CEOs to delay, deny and destroy peoples lives to suit their own purposes.

 

How about we rely on the self assessed ratings that trusts give themselves, so that they can continue to have “Foundation” status and be financially independent of “Government”.

 

Or do we just ignore all the stats and let the Management carry on blithely, with no checks or come backs, killing patients by the tens of thousands, ignoring patients’ pain and disablements.

 

Should we return to the nineteenth century when Doctors were Gods and patients slabs of meat with no rights and less dignity.

 

Or maybe we could find out the truth, let the Government hold a referendum on our NHS, ask us what we like, and what we don’t, on a trust by trust basis and on a national scale, so that we can see where the bad apples are in the NHS barrel, so that we can tell them what we want for a change.

It must be worth a thought.

 

Angus

Death and the NHS

 

 

Been a while since I posted here, real life has a habit of buggering up your blogging.

 

Couple of items today the first is from the Telegraph, it seems that if you have Vascular surgery in a small Hospital you are more likely to die than if you were admitted to a large hospital for the same operation.

Death rates in planned vascular surgery varied from fewer than one in 50 in some hospitals to more than one in 10 in others, according to data collected by the Guardian from surgeons at 116 hospital trusts.

More than 5,000 vascular operations are carried out each year, most of which are planned.

Patients were found to be less likely to die during a planned operation in the bigger hospital units where surgical teams are more skilled because they perform the operations more frequently.

Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, announced a moratorium on anyreorganisation within the health service last month, including the closure of smaller hospitals in favour of larger institutions.

The death rate at Scarborough Hospital in Yorkshire was among the highest, with 29 per cent of patients admitted for planned vascular surgery having died in the three-year period from 2006 to 2008. The national average was just over 4%.

Scarborough said it has stopped offering the operation.

Other hospital trusts where the death rates following planned surgery were high included Gateshead, on 12.9 per cent and Hull on 9 per cent and Leeds on 7.1per cent.

Gateshead and Hull blamed a high number of difficult cases; while Leeds pointed out that it has brought its death rates steadily down over recent years.

Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS and a former heart surgeon, told the Guardian: "Surgeons have a moral and professional duty to know what they are doing, how well they are doing it and to use that information to help them improve – otherwise they have no right to be doing it at all."

 

Have I been beamed to a parallel universe? A knob from the NHS who is also a surgeon admitting that the walking on water, arrogant, club together, omnipotent surgeons cock up and kill people, is this a first? Will this change the way surgeons “operate” and will they humbly beg forgiveness from the relatives of those butchered by the “untouchables”?

 

Of course it won’t;  they will carry on maiming, killing and denying any responsibility, the old boy’s club is stronger now than ever, the GMC has developed many different personas, which enable it to let those that are senior walk away from evidence based incompetence and those that are junior lose their careers for the smallest of mistakes.

 

The other tale also comes from the Telegraph.

Patients are much more likely to die if they are rushed to hospital at weekends than during the week, because too few senior staff are working, a new study suggests.

Higher deaths rates at weekends mean thousands of patients every year are dying unnecessarily, according to the findings.

Patients were seven per cent more likely to die if they were admitted as an emergency case on a Saturday or Sunday, the largest study of its kind shows.

The higher rates were equivalent to 3,369 extra deaths a year, more than the total number who die every year on Britain’s roads.

Conditions including heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and some cancers all had higher deaths rates at weekends than Monday to Friday.

The team behind the findings warned that a lack of senior staff, such as consultants, working weekends and reduced access to specialist services could be behind the higher death rates.

Hospitals should look closely at weekend staffing rotas and other potential problem areas, according to researchers.

Dr Paul Aylin, from Imperial College London, who led the study, said: "We estimate that there were over 3,000 more deaths than expected at weekends in 2005/06 compared to weekdays – more than the number of people dying in road accidents in 2006.

“Clearly this is a significant number of people and we need to get to the bottom of what this means.

"Staffing levels are often lower at weekends, with fewer senior medical staff around, and some specialist services are less available.

The study looked at all emergency patients admitted to 163 hospital trusts across England between 2005 and 2006.

The findings are published in the journal Quality & Safety in Health Care.

The study, supported by Dr Foster Intelligence, the independent research company, reviewed more than four million admissions and 215,000 deaths.

 

No surprises there really, the £175,000 pa consultants can’t be expected to work at weekends, after all they have to keep up their golf handicap.

 

Angus