I am not often given to rants, well not publicly anyway.
I was listening to the news on the radio this morning where they were discussing the state of hospitals and how so many beds are blocked by the elderly; the suggestion to solve the problem is easy, keep them in their own homes or community.
These are amongst the most fragile of our community, people who have served their country for years only to find out the golden promise of a caring NHS is to say you are occupying beds required for more important people than you.
Knowing a lot of the elderly, they will take it on the chin, not complain and die like good citizens relieving the country of the burden of paying pensions/winter fuel allowances for them and releasing a few beds for more deserving causes such as those who use the NHS as a fly-in service.
It might have had the reputation of being a caring service, and certainly when it was set up in the post war it was incredibly different to what had gone before, now we are reducing it to less than it was pre-NHS as relatives are working to pay the bills and won't be available when Mum/Dad/Uncle/Aunt have need of them and that is even if they live in the same location.. with house prices going up, sometimes they have to move miles away to get accommodation.
Stop paying the benefits to those people who have just come in, if they can't support themselves for the first year as they do in Australia then we shouldn't be supporting them either... put the money saved to create a first class NHS service which actively seeks to ensure we give a good quality of life from birth to death and don't take short cuts.
Get rid of some of the fat cats in the NHS, bring back real nurses not academic nurses.. I don't disagree that education is needed, but what is needed most is the care and compassion to actively provide care. I didn't see what the problem was with the old SEN/SRN system and having a degree doesn't make you a caring nurse, just an educated one and trust me Mrs Smith who at 87 just needs help to eat her lunch doesn't care if you have a string of qualifications, just that you have time for her.
Go on - tell me I am wrong.. please
4 comments:
Not wrong at all, I agree with every word.
Get rid of some of the fat cats in the NHS, bring back real nurses not academic nurses
Absolutely agree - and I am not an NHS basher, although there IS plenty wrong in the NHS of course.
I agree absolutely with everything you say,Sage. It's a pity the politicians don't have the common sense to see the problems!
No disagreement here. Both of my elderly parents were nursed by wonderful nurses, but those nurses were constantly battling against a system that saw patients as numbers, statistics, diseases, and as.... clients.
But not as what they are, people. Men and women, people with skills, knowledge, intelligence...
My father, a man who'd fought through world-war two, survived hell as a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, come back to raise four university-educated children, risen to the post of chief executive in a group of textile companies, well, his achievements were far beyond that, my father, a very polite man, with time for everyone, hit his nurse-call button, and when help arrived, pointed to the social-services worker who'd come to him with a heap of papers. "Will someone please get this bloody woman out of here? I'm old, not stupid, and she's treating me like a mental pigmy!".
Of course, she complained vociferously.
The same thing happened a few years later to my mother, who had a brain that was as agile as ever, yet was talked down to by people labelled as carers.
She was a little deaf, not dotty.
Ask her about some obscure opera, or the latin name of a plant, or poetry, or Shakespeare, or give her a convoluted crossword clue, and the answer would be there before you finished asking.
Yet they're talking to her as though she's a retarded toddler.
It made me so mad. I knew what that woman had done in her life, how dare they treat here like an only semi-sentient cabbage?
Grrrrr!
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