What's the difference between South African state police killing an innocent taxi-driver and UK state NHS staff killing innocent patients?

What's the difference between South African state police killing an innocent taxi-driver and UK NHS staff killing innocent patients?
 

Is there one? - Yes. - The South African police involved have been arrested...

Thousands of deaths caused by clinical negligence in the NHS

The Telegraph reports on the latest statistics about thousands of deaths caused by clinical negligence in the NHS. "The figures cover some of Britain’s worst hospital scandals including up to 1,200 people dying because Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust put Whitehall targets and cost-cutting ahead of care."

Until death because of negligence by NHS staff is appropriately punished, after trial of the negligent individuals in a criminal court, clinical negligence will continue as a prominent feature of NHS 'care'. The present scandalous unaccountability of NHS healthcare professionals naturally does nothing to discourage negligence.

Disgracefully poor care for elderly patients in some UK hospitals

Today's is but the latest of the litany of shameful reports of Britain's substandard treatment of elderly, vulnerable people in NHS hospitals. In the Telegraph we read: "Unacceptable care has become standard in some trusts, with doctors and nurses talking down to patients, ignoring their calls for assistance and failing to help them eat, drink or wash. After carrying out spot checks at geriatric wards in 100 hospitals, the commission found that 35 needed to make improvements, 18 were failing to meet legal standards and there were “major concerns” at two trusts."

This has rightly been the top news item today, both in print and on the broadcast media. There are always apologists with their ever-ready excuses of insufficient cash/time/nurses/resources, of course, but this will cut no ice with people who have experienced the routine 'uncare' for themselves, or have visited neglected elderly patients on these wards of shame. "Katherine Murphy, the chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “Yet another report to add to the plethora of other reports, all highlighting the same issues around poor care of elderly patients in hospital. "How many reports do we have to look at and how many times do the public need to hear about this before the right action is taken?”"

Why does nothing improve? - I'll tell you why: because no-one is held accountable. - Remember, despite presiding over the avoidable suffering and deaths of around 400 patients at that infamous, inhuman Stafford hospital between January 2005 and March 2009, Martin Yeates, claiming to be 'ill', was allowed to cry off even attending at the public inquiry into the scandal! Furthermore he received a golden handshake - £400,000 (that's a thousand pounds for each death!) - and has a jewel-encrusted pension to look forward to, as well as being able to apply for other obscenely-highly paid similar jobs in another area! Instead of being tried in a criminal court for the manslaughter of hundreds of his fellow-citizens, this scoundrel has been richly rewarded for his dereliction of duty.

When grave wrongdoing incurs no sanction, there will be no reform. We have read today of hospitals that are 'failing to meet legal standards'. - Very well, let's see the people responsible for this tried in court and sentenced appropriately. That would very soon result in better care for vulnerable patients.

Hospitals still cover up poor standards and neglect and still give scant regard to complaints

UK hospitals still cover up poor standards and neglect and still give complaints scant regard. See this Telegraph report. I strongly suggest reading the comments beneath the report too. Unaccountability shames our health service and ensures that its many failings continue. I know from horrifying personal experience the cruel futility of complaining about NHS treatment.

The Ombudsman's damning report of cruel neglect of vulnerable elderly patients in NHS hospitals and staff's callous indifference to their suffering

The Ombudsman's damning report of cruel neglect of vulnerable elderly patients in NHS hospitals and callous indifference to their suffering by staff employed to look after them has filled our newspapers and our broadcast media. See Telegraph report here, BBC report here, Guardian report here. We have many times over many years read of such horrors. Nothing appropriate is ever done about this atrocious cruelty by healthcare staff on their innocent fellow citizens - their patients, their victims. Read the Comments left beneath the newspaper articles and see other sickening examples of arrant cruelty by our highly-paid healthcare staff.

Since its inception the NHS has been protected from censure and sanction alike in matters of professional negligence. For decades its damaged victims were prohibited from even making a complaint! Then when complaints at last were permitted, the standard response to serious complaints was that the complainant was mistaken, lying, half-witted, mentally ill, trying to obtain compensation without cause, and similar nonsense directed toward attacking the complainant rather than investigating the complaint. Nothing was done about actually dealing with the complaints. And this is still the case.

In the intervening years it has become easier to make a complaint, but still nothing is done about the complaint, and the cases of negligence are increasing - inevitably, since the staff learn more and more surely, that they are unaccountable. The NHS Complaints Procedures are, and are designed to be, exercises in futility, and the Government is hoping to put an end to any scrap of justice for victims of medical negligence who go to Law by removing the possibility of legal aid in these cases.

As usual people who are ever-ready to defend the indefensible assure us that these flaws must be looked at in perspective, likewise assuring us that the vast majority of NHS patients are happy with their treatment. - Not remotely true, dear Reader. - That there are a lot of people ready to defend the NHS is not unconnected with the fact that the NHS is the largest employer in Europe, and so its employees and their dependants defend it. By contrast, read this Guardian article: "Half the patients treated in NHS hospitals are dissatisfied with the standard of care, a survey by the consumer organisation Which? reveals today. But it found few patients complain to NHS staff about inedible food, lack of cleanliness or poor organisation on the wards.

Among those who were dissatisfied, over a third thought raising an issue would not make any difference. Almost a quarter said nothing because they "expected their hospital stay to be like that" and 12% feared that a complaint would provoke reprisals and compromise their care.

Which? said doctors, managers and politicians interpreted the low level of complaints as evidence of patient satisfaction. But the survey suggested they were fooling themselves."

On Radio 4's Thought for the Day this morning, the speaker was James Jones, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. His talk was a paean of praise for the NHS.

On Radio 4's Thought For The Day this morning, the speaker was James Jones, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. His talk was a paean of praise for the NHS.

I wonder how many hundreds of listeners were, like me, profoundly distressed by his message today. Bishop James praised the NHS and was especially commendatory of the fact that its services are 'free' - 'free' at the point of need. (They are not free, of course. They are extremely expensive, but are paid for out of taxation, rather than directly by the patients to the providers.) He roundly condemns the system in some other countries, of requiring the patient's credit card (to ensure payment) before providing treatment, but disregards the doctrinaire processes demanded by the NHS before NHS treatment is provided, e.g. here - or not provided, as is the sad experience, too often, of too many patients, including victims of medical negligence, and that includes me.

I challenge Bishop James to read of my long, cruel, shocking treatment at the hands of the NHS abusing its power and see if he finds that praiseworthy. How can he praise an NHS for providing 'free' treatment, when that free treatment includes the callous disregard that led to so much suffering and so many ghastly deaths at that Staffordshire Hospital? See here, here, here. How does a man of the cloth live with the treatment of hundreds of innocent children in NHS 'care' at the hands of Dr Andrew Holden? - See here and here. Why does Bishop James disregard the dark, evil side of the NHS? Why does he champion the powerful, rather than champion their victims? The NHS does not need his advocacy; its suffering victims do.

I have tried in past years to obtain the help of Bishops to bring about reform of the cruel system, and I have failed. - David Lunn, when he was Bishop of Sheffield, promised me that he would help, but he let me down shamefully. Similarly David Jenkins, when he was Bishop of Durham, said he would help, but did not. Other prominent, influential religious leaders I have approached have also passed by on the other side, allowing NHS cruelty and victimisation to continue unchallenged. Where are the Good Samaritans in the churches, with the courage and the compassion to do right by the NHS's victims and to work to reform a system that is rotten at its core?

I challenge Bishop James to come and spend some hours with me, that I can tell him more about the callous, careless NHS system that is my own experience, and that of thousands of his fellow citizens.

The appallingly poor treatment, including being left to starve, of thousands of elderly dementia patients in UK hospitals

See this report in the Telegraph. - Doesn't it shock you and make you feel ashamed of the NHS? Why isn't something done about it? We will all be old one day unless we die before our time. Is this the way you would be happy to be treated if you ever suffer the misfortune of developing dementia and going into one of these uncaring hospitals? Why don't staff who are maltreating patients in these ways get identified and punished? - Why are they allowed to get away with it, since this clearly encourages them to continue in the same cruel way?

Well done to the Daily Mail for campaigning about the appalling care provided to far too many elderly patients by our unaccountable NHS!

As readers of this blog already know, the NHS Complaints Procedure does nothing about complaints except make life harder for the complainants; it is a sheer waste of time and effort making a complaint about poor or negligent treatment. And Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for 'Justice', is proposing to remove clinical negligence from the scope of the civil legal aid scheme, so no help there either for anyone brave enough to take on as adversaries the extremely experienced legal eagles employed by the NHS and the healthcare professionals.

So very well done to the Daily Mail for campaigning about the appalling care accorded to far too many elderly patients by our non-accountable NHS, and for making a large donation to the Patients Association, a charity that tries to help victims of poor NHS treatment.

13% increase in written complaints about NHS and community services

The Patients Association reports a rise of over 13% in the number of written complaints about the NHS and community services, and Katherine Murphy, Chief Executive, deplores "stories of neglect, misdiagnosis and a distinct lack of care and compassion," and states that the number of complaints between 2008/9 to 2009/10 rose from 89,139 to 101,077, and that this is certainly a massive underestimate of the number of people who actually want to complain. She says, "We need a fundamental review of the complaints process. As a first step every person that makes a complaint should be asked to rate the response and that information should also be published. That will also enable us to pick up those Trusts making no effort to learn. At a time when the NHS is facing budget constraints, we want to make sure that the quality of care patients receive is not compromised and that staff and management become more open and more accepting of complaints and respond constructively when something goes wrong."

A previous Chair of the Patients Association told me years ago that she did not know of even one case of a complainant being satisfied with the response to their complaint. My own experience of the NHS Complaints Procedures is that the complainant is actually punished for making the complaint, and nothing at all is done to help the complainant or to prevent appalling treatment from happening again. Indeed, that the healthcare staff complained about are routinely protected from censure or sanction, ensures that poor treatment will be repeated.

NICE issues draft guidance that broken hips should be operated on on the day of admission or the day after

NICE has issued draft guidance that broken hips should be operated on on the day of admission or the day after, as reported by the Telegraph, in order to reduce complications. The report states that "in some hospitals around half of patients wait longer than 48-hours for surgery even though evidence shows it doubles the risk of major complications and death."

Surely this is a no-brainer! If delay "doubles the risk of major complications and death," what on earth are surgeons thinking of? - How can they routinely be doubling the risk of their hip fracture patients (who are mainly elderly, and many of whom are frail and ill) suffering major complications and death? This is disgraceful. Is it an example of covert age discrimination?

The longer the delay, the more pain the patients will suffer, the more physiotherapy and other rehabilitation they will need, the longer stay in hospital, the more support/care at home. - All avoidable extra suffering, all avoidable extra expense.

I've never had a hip fracture, thankfully, but I've had a very complicated fracture of the humerus, which needed an operation. If I had had the operation within a few days, as I was promised on admission to the Northern General Hospital, I would have been back at home again within a week, I am sure, little the worse from the fracture. But because my agonising pain from the splint was discounted and it was almost a fortnight before the arm was operated on, there was massive damage to my right hand - mainly radial nerve palsy and ulna nerve injury - and my stay in hospital lasted a month instead of the few days it would have been with prompt treatment. My (dominant) right hand was completely unusable and intensely painful for months. No one in the system ever apologised or even expressed regret.

I needed many months of physiotherapy and occupational therapy before I could move the hand at all. - It takes you a few seconds to read that sentence. - Just think of having to cope with that yourself: months with a swollen hand, totally unusable and exquisitely tender to the slightest touch. And I have had to have carers to help me since then, though I previously had managed without. Are these inexcusable delays attributable to callousness, ignorance, incompetence or what? - They are certainly unnecessary and they benefit no-one.

If David Cameron speaks out on the subject of human rights abuses while in China

I hope the response he receives will include a reminder that the UK itself has an extremely poor record on human rights. - Read about Chemical Cosh drugs that are harming and bringing early death to many thousands of dementia sufferers. And the appallingly callous treatment in the Staffordshire Hospital that resulted in terrible suffering and premature death for hundreds of patients. And the many millions of UK citizens (mostly women) gravely harmed for decades by tranquillisers and other toxic psychotropic drugs which are still being prescribed by foolish doctors. - Just a few examples of the atrocious treatment far too many UK citizens routinely receive from the NHS.

Record Rise in Complaints about the NHS

BBC News reports a record increase in complaints about the NHS. As I have written several times in this blog, since nothing is ever done about NHS Complaints (see
Cruelty, Clinical Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS,
Complaints in Hospitals,
NHS Complaints Procedures Exposed and
The politics of salt consumption and powerful vested interests)
it is almost inevitable that complaints will continue to increase. If you read the individual comments beneath the BBC report you will see further examples of the futility of making a complaint about the NHS. Doctors and dentists are a law unto themselves and consider themselves inviolate against complaints made by patients. I sincerely believe that they and the rest of the NHS do far, far, far more harm than good.

Mad NHS versions of 'Catch 22' used to cover up medical negligence or The patient's place is in the wrong.

If you refuse painkillers, explaining that painkillers do not work on you, then you are told it is your own fault you are in pain because of your refusal to take painkillers. The actual cause of the pain is not addressed.

Dental version: If you have such excruciating and constant toothache that sleep is impossible and you cry with all the stress of pain and exhaustion and sleeplessness, this proves you are suffering from Depression, not Toothache. If by monumental effort you manage not to cry, this proves you are not in pain.

If you are overweight this means you are greedy and lazy and you are told to eat less and exercise more. If you then eat less and exercise more and, of course, you do not lose weight because this advice does not work, this proves you did not follow the advice and you are told again to eat less and exercise more.

NHS Trusts put patient safety at risk by failing to implement safety alerts in over 1000 instances

BBC News carries this report. As you will see, the regulatory bodies respond with their usual complacency, but "There can be no excuse for trusts continuing to put lives at unnecessary risk," said chief executive of the charity, Action Against Medical Accidents, Peter Walsh.

I suggest that the highest-paid member of the NHS Trust management team be made specifically responsible for the Patient Safety Alerts being implemented, and implemented on time, with a clause in his/her contract of employment that they will be sacked without pension/testimonial/reference/right of appeal the first time they fail to do this. This, I think, would ensure that an appropriate level of importance and urgency be accorded to this measure upon which, after all, patient lives depend.

Deaths of Alan Sillitoe and Peter Porter

So Alan Sillitoe and Peter Porter have left us. Their deaths have evoked memories in me.

I remember years ago going to stay in Cambridge for a few days at the invitation of a friend who was reading chemistry at Newnham College. She was there for some weeks in the summer; I think it was known as the Long Vac term. Specific memories of that time: sitting on a river bank on a warm, heavenly evening as the strains of "Dido and Aeneas" reached us from a concert performance somewhere, and discovering a copy of Sillitoe's newly published "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" in the College library and borrowing it and devouring it at speed. When the film of the book came out later it was as riveting and eye-opening as the book and I became a lifelong admirer of Albert Finney's acting.

In the 70's I went to hear Peter Porter read from his poetry and answer questions and it was great...(o: Such a friendly, enjoyable evening. Afterwards I had a long chat with him about Philip Larkin, who was my favourite poet at the time, and for whom I had coveted the Poet Laureateship. Strangely, Porter had recently spent an evening with Larkin ("last Saturday evening", was what he said, if I remember correctly). He was so easy to talk to and unhurriedly generous with his time.

In those days it was easy for me to get about, as it is for most people, and easy for me to read books and to go to lectures and the like, because those were the days before the long, cruel negligence of the National Health Service transformed my life into a dystopian microworld of exhaustion and difficulty. Largely housebound, scarcely able to hold a book because my hands are so delicate - courtesy of the 'caring' professions - and struggling to concentrate on the text, reading is now a rare and painful pleasure.

BBC Panorama's programme tonight about very poor quality care in some NHS hospitals and the misleading claims they had made about the quality of care

I watched BBC Panorama's programme tonight about very poor quality care in some NHS hospitals and the misleading claims they had made about the quality of that care. For many years I have myself experienced deplorable NHS care both as an in-patient and as an out-patient and indeed had my health wantonly and callously destroyed by the 'caring professions'. And I've had a lot of personal experience of their lies.

If you hold the view that the NHS is admirable and that we are fortunate to have it I very profoundly disagree with you. - You must be one of the lucky ones who has not yet been harmed by the NHS. You can view tonight's programme on the iPlayer here: Panorama: Trust Us We're an NHS Hospital.

Or you can read about it on this BBC News webpage. If you think that making a complaint remedies anything you are mistaken. Complaints are routinely ignored, and certainly not acted upon. They routinely add to the problems and suffering of the complainants. See Fighting the System.

I firmly believe the NHS does far more harm than good and that it should be scrapped.

Fighting the System: NHS Complaints Procedures

The first feature article I wrote for Mensa’s monthly glossy magazine was about medical and dental negligence and the uselessness, cruelty and bias of the NHS Complaints Procedures, and was entitled ‘Fighting the System’. In the years since then there will have been changes to the Complaints Procedure, but I am confident that it still harms complainants rather than helping them or reforming the system.
This is a slightly shortened version of the article:

Fighting the System

An abscess flared up on one of my front teeth. Talking was difficult and sleep impossible. My dentist said there was nothing wrong. So I went to the Dental Hospital. The pain – sudden, acute, accompanied by swelling, most severe when biting – was exactly characteristic of an acute abscess. But the pain was discounted and the abscess not treated.

When you have toothache you chew in strange ways to avoid exacerbating it. This puts unnatural pressures on teeth and it is easy to crack them. This happened to me. A cracked cusp, a separate agony, went untreated. Tooth-brushing was an ordeal and could not be as thorough as before the pain. Decay started, causing further severe toothache. This also went untreated. It was almost a year before the abscess was treated. It was over two years before I obtained treatment for all the dental disorders causing the toothache!

If consulted by a man with an abscess and weeping in agony, surely the most negligent dentist would take note of the signs and symptoms and would treat the abscess in its acute phase, ending the pain. In a full year of many attendances at the Sheffield Dental Hospital I was constantly insulted and left in agony. One consultant called me ‘You Fat Depressives’, plural, instead of using my name. It was clear that he habitually addressed suffering women in this way.

I eventually found a dentist brave enough to try to put things right. He dealt with the gross infections, etc but tragically much of the pain had by this time become chronic, which often happens when the cause is not dealt with promptly.

I heard from other women who had had their pain derided or been told that it was ‘nerves’ or ‘all in the mind’. One Rotherham woman had endured agony from trigeminal neuralgia for 13 years before someone (a neurosurgeon in private practice) took her pain seriously and operated. The pain then stopped. Trigeminal neuralgia mainly attacks women and its only symptom is pain. It is not uncommon for people to kill themselves because of severe toothache or because of trigeminal neuralgia, so intense is the pain.

Thirteen years of needless agony. Why does such cruelty flourish? The answer is many-faceted, of course. It includes ignorance and arrogance. Pre-eminent, however, is the health professional’s demeaning attitude towards women, coupled with the scandalous fact that in this country doctors and dentists are accountable to no-one, not to the patient, not to the hospital, not to the NHS.

Women are sub-human, second-class citizens whose voice need not be heeded. Everyone knows, don’t they, that whatever a woman complains of, the ‘real’ cause is usually psychological, and instead of investigation and treatment all she needs is a brusque injunction to pull herself together and a prescription for tranquillisers and anti-depressants. That’ll settle her!

In my desperate efforts to obtain the treatment I needed I turned to every health agency. All pretended that negligence does not occur. No-one insisted that my teeth be examined and my agonising toothache dealt with. The health agencies and the people to whom complainants must address complaints are financed by the DHSS or the NHS and by definition not impartial. The Complaints Procedure routinely adds to the difficulties of complainants rather than dealing with their complaints of negligence.

Why are the legislators not moved to effective remedial legislation? There are many reasons, I suppose; laziness, fear, the myth of medical infallibility, the desire to keep in with medics and their retinues, the fact that most MPs use private medicine rather than the NHS and that when they do use the NHS they get preferential treatment. Surely, also, a lack of imagination – failure to comprehend the scale of the suffering, the profound and terrible difficulties of damaged victims – trapped in pain and distress and worry, trapped in misunderstanding, trapped in bewilderment that those to whom they turn for help and from whom they have been led to believe they will receive it, adopt a confrontational stance. There is no-one in the entire edifice of the Health Service from whom victims of medical negligence can be assured of receiving help. They do not know where to turn.

In the Sheffield Star of August 20th 1986, the Administrator of the Sheffield Family Practitioner Committee is quoted as saying of complaints that most of them ‘were dealt with amicably, although in some cases the patient was struck off’. Dealing with complaints is clearly thought of as a matter of smoothing ruffled feathers or of placating/punishing the complainant, rather than of examining faults that need to be put right. If you made a complaint about trains, you would not consider it resolved by being forbidden to travel by train any more, would you? Why should a complaint about a doctor be considered resolved by crossing the complainant off his list?

When in the press someone criticises the medical profession, another person is certain to write in to protest that they themselves received wonderful treatment. e.g. the dreadful way that Sue Arnold was treated at the Moorfields Eye Clinic in London, reported a few months ago in her column in the Observer magazine. The following week someone wrote about their wonderful treatment there. If you publicised finding a dead mouse in a loaf, no-one would dream of writing to say that they had had a loaf from the same shop and it hadn’t had a dead mouse in it! Officials aver that the public makes few complaints about the Health Service. Like saying that most of our loaves don’t contain dead mice.

The official claim disregards the justifiable fears many people have about making a complaint. You risk being struck off a doctor’s list (and often the family of the complainant is also struck off) and may find it difficult to get a doctor at all.

The main reason for outraged complaint is being treated as sub-human. As I was. Callously left in agony which could easily have been treated and which I clearly could not treat myself. Agony for which it was impossible to get relief without the treatment that was being denied me. Abscesses and caries cannot ‘get better’. There has to be professional intervention.

By allowing medics to insult people under the guise of diagnosing them, by allowing honourable people to be treated in this appalling way, humanity is defiled. By categorising the person who then complains as a nuisance who must be pacified if possible and quelled if not, no-one is safe from such defilement.

There are moves to tinker with the Complaints Procedure. The Primary Health Care leaflet, with the Government’s proposals for discussion on health services outside hospital, suggests that there should be informal conciliation procedures to settle less serious complaints quickly and effectively. Again the ruffled feathers syndrome. Complainants do not want conciliation, they want remedial action taken about the complaint. Officially, negligence does not occur. So nothing is done about it.

It would be salutary to cause to be published a sample of the complaints of the last year and what the Complaints Procedure did about them. This would show it up for the charade it is. One only hears of anything being done if the matter is given publicity, which seldom helps.

That suffering, ill, exhausted people damaged by the medical profession have the right to redress in the civil courts is no right at all. Only 3% or 4% of cases get to court and they take a minimum of 4 years to get there. Everything is weighted against the victim, especially the hostile attitude of the Health Authorities. In any case, action in the civil courts has only individual relevance. General reform cannot result.

What victims most need is remedial treatment. There is no provision for this. What can be more important than the right to urgent remedial treatment when you have been harmed by hospital personnel? Gross medical negligence is compounded by the implacable unhelpfulness of the Health Authorities.

The NHS should be accountable to the consumer – i.e. the patient. Medical and dental staff have absolute power to give or to withhold necessary investigation and treatment to patients, to treat them with insolence, to defame their characters in privileged communications, etc. provided only that they call this the exercise of ‘clinical judgment’. (Compare this with, in recent times in Parliament, the ritual incantation that a matter is one of ‘national security’ and as such no-one has the right to question it.) Such power is clearly dangerous, is open to abuse and is clearly being abused. Terrible suffering like mine would be totally prevented if medical and dental staff were accountable.

Negligence

There can be nothing in this country more heinously unjust than the lack of help for the suffering victims of medical negligence. Patients have no protection whatsoever from the ignorance, incompetence, negligence and sometimes sheer malice of doctors and dentists. People who are not victims of the system are unaware of the situation. That negligent doctors and dentists incur neither censure nor sanction from the system ensures that negligence flourishes.

It is a moral imperative for caring people to do what they can to bring a speedy end to this cruelty.

The Complaints Procedure needs to be scrapped and replaced by a system providing immediate help for the victim of negligence (I don’t mean money; I mean remedial treatment and support) and an independent inquiry into the negligence with the purpose of apportioning responsibility and instituting reform to protect potential future victims. I stress that I am not interested in legal redress. I am asking for legislative action to remedy a national scandal.

The Health Ombudsman defines instances of medical negligence as matters of clinical judgment, and matters of clinical judgment, conveniently for negligent doctors and dentists, are outside his terms of reference. So he does not help. His reply to my letter made clear that he had given scant attention to my arduously compiled material. My evidence was ignored.

This state of affairs is independent of who the individuals are who become victims, being only dependent on the deficiencies of a system which allows the magic phrase ‘clinical judgment’ to override reason, humanity and justice. Clinical judgment cannot, by definition, obtain, where clinical diagnostic procedures have been waived. To pretend otherwise is an abuse of language, an abuse of trust, effectively an abuse of power and in practice a physical and psychological abuse of individual victims.

These abuses are systemic and must be rooted out. The powerless and suffering need protection from such cruelty.

There was a public inquiry about Wendy Savage, a doctor neither negligent nor incompetent, and about whom no patients had lodged complaints. There are no inquiries into real cases of negligence, initiated by the victims. Health professionals would be much more careful if their actions were to be subjected to public scrutiny.

Margaret Wilde

Further severe criticism of poor NHS treatment of elderly patients and dementia patients

BBC News reports further severe criticism by the Alzheimer's Society of NHS treatment of elderly patients and dementia patients. Half of all dementia sufferers leave hospital in a worse state than when they arrived.

"The Patients' Association said it was a "sad indictment" of the priority our society gives to elderly people.

"There is now an overwhelming amount of evidence that elderly patients are being neglected in hospitals across the NHS.

"Whether they have dementia or not, if they are in need of help with personal care many of them won't get it. Time after time the issue is raised, but the problems continue.""

And of course NHS Complaints Procedures are Orwellian in the extreme. Nothing gets improved.

The NHS is extremely expensive and so much of the vast expense is wasted and compounded by providing poor and damaging treatment for the most vulnerable patients, who are most in need of care and compassion. - And heaven help you if you haven't any family to visit and stick up for you!

Dame Joan Bakewell highlights ageist attitudes and poor care for elderly people by NHS and in care homes.

Dame Joan Bakewell has drawn attention to ageist attitudes, neglect and poor care for elderly people by the NHS and in care homes. See Telegraph report.

Massive overuse of antipsychotics to treat elderly patients with dementia in UK's hospital wards.

The Telegraph reports on massive overuse of antipsychotics to treat elderly patients with dementia in UK's hospital wards. As well as the article itself, there is a letter today on the letters page of the Telegraph - a letter drawing attention to this scandalous abuse of the human rights of vulnerable citizens. The letter is signed by spokespeople for ten leading charities, carers groups and experts. These drugs cause serious side-effects and increase the risk of death. I am sure that the doctors who prescribe these dangerous drugs would run a mile from themselves being made to take the drugs! There is a similar situation in care homes - dementia patients being overprescribed this pharmaceutical junk, sometimes called a 'chemical cosh'.
But these facts are not new facts. They have long been known but nothing effective has been done to curb this abuse of NHS patients. The letter urges that the government crack down on this overprescribing. When I heard about this on the radio I gained the impression that it is doctors who are largely to blame. But the government must surely have the power to curb the reckless over-prescribing of drugs by our drug-obsessed doctors. - They should do so promptly. - I personally favour making it a criminal offence to prescribe this junk inappropriately, harming the patient. A few successful prosecutions would soon bring down the reckless prescribing rates of doctors.