Here
So the NHS left 485 patients on trollies for more than 12 hours last week. Yes, alright, that's not good for those poor souls. But let's get this in perspective.
The NHS 'deals with' about 5 million patients a week.
485 patients on a trolley for > 12 hours is 0.01% of patients on a trolley for > 12 hours.
Or the other way about, 99.99% of patients weren't on a trolley for > 12 hours.
Quite why this is something that May / Corbyn could win or lose a debate over defeats me.
It's clearly a non-event.
Sigh.
Snowy
7 minutes ago
18 comments:
Yes, that is why I am always slow to slag off the NHS, they make loads of mistakes and individual stories are infuriating, but given the volume of patients, it's a tiny percentage of a percentage.
If the pols keep busy arguing about irrelevancies like this, then perhaps we won't notice they are neglecting the real issues.
The British public has made it very clear that they don't want people being neglected in hospitals.Nobody thinks of percentages when they themselves or people they care for lie there without care. The Tories are taking this percentage line with the No-mates May going into mathematical loopy land at PMQ saying what really matters is creating an economy that can provide a health Service. Carry on like this and its bye,bye, bye.
Right, but shouldn't you first remove from the 5m figure all patients who would never have needed to be in a bed, on a trolley, etc. first? Anyone who's a walk-in for a cough, cut, change of plaster cast, whatever, should be excluded before you calculate the %age, surely?
Hospitals are obviously under 'increasing' pressures but the real 'crisis' is in social care and that in turn keeps people in hospital long after they are medically ready fir discharge. That's probably the way government wants it. Social care is something they can 'plausibly' distance themselves from.
AVI,
"Anyone who's a walk-in for a cough, cut, change of plaster cast, whatever,"
sits in a chair in the waiting room, not in a bed or trolley. The clue is in the fact that they walked in and will walk out, even if they have to wait a while to be seen.
AVI/Curtis Fair point. Lets have a look at that then.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/hospital-beds
So, ~ 150,000 beds/day. 7 x 150000 = 1,050,000 beds / week.
485/1,050,000 = 0.05%
Or. 485 / 7 = 69.
69 / 150,000 = 0.05%
Whatever way you cut it I do not think that this 485 number is statistically significant and does not help the debate as to whether the NHS has enough money and resources or not. It's a silly meaningless number. It is impossible for any healthcare system to have 'enough beds' all the time for every eventuality. Doing so would mean having thousands of beds standing empty, and costing money, all the time. There would be a huge opportunity cost to that which may mean that, say, outpatient services were cut. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Also found this:
http://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/data-and-charts/overnight-hospital-beds-england
L. You're right about the cost of having hospital beds empty/available and I agree about the relatively tiny number of excessive trolley waits etc but there is also a cost to having too few beds. That in itself means hospitals incur excessive costs, delaying treatment to non emergency patients who will still need to be admitted [rather than just patched up and sent home] and require more A&E staff just to deal with the increasing numbers in that dept'.
I think it worth mentioning too, that we do in fact have far fewer beds per head of population than the other countries with whom we are routinely compared with. ie;Germany [3 X as many], France, etc. Again though, the high occupancy rates in hospital beds is clearly exacerbated by the real 'crisis' in social care. Organising care packages for people needing to go home and people on waiting lists to get into nursing homes etc is a chronic bed blocker.
P156. Your point about 'fewer beds than Germany or France for example'. Isn't there a much more market oriented health care system in both those countries?
So.....
http://reaction.life/can-nhs-breaking-point-advertising-jobs-like/
If there are more than 485 people working within diversity/outreach type programs in the NHS then we have a solution to the problem, don't we?
Re Lola's comment. From the same Kings fund site, 100 non-elective (emergency) admissions per 1000 people in England per year, gives us 102,000 admissions per week. Then 485/102,000 = 0.475%. That's almost 1 in 200, which, to my mind, is substantial.
JBagley. Hang on a minute. The assumption is that the 485 were emergency admissions. Are you sure? Even so, it still means that 99.5% of admissions are being handled in 'less than 12 hours'. That's seems like a pretty god result to me - given the massively unwieldy nature of the NHS.
@L What is the problem with a few beds empty? There may be thousands across the whole system but so what? Better to err on the side of patient safety than reach some exact , average, figure .There are no doubt hospital administrators cutting bed numbers and getting promoted by fellow headbangers but I should imagine the medical staff think its all too boring and just want enough beds and if that means an excess at some point in the year so be it.
DBCR. Because it's not 'just' empty beds. There is a cost to 'empty beds' - stand by staff, heating, lighting, equipment, etc. etc. Yes, clearly you need some 'float', but there are times of exceptional demand which cannot be predicted. So there will be occasions, in any such system' when demand exceeds supply.
The point I am making is that the numbers bandied about by Corbyn, May and Co. are just not significant. And in fact if that's all that were kept waiting it is astonishing.
As you will recall I have personal experience of both the catastrophic bureaucratic inefficiency of the NHS and its clinical excellence and its delays.
L. Both Germany and France have a mixed system with about three quarters of expenditures met by the state. They do both spend considerably more per head of population than the UK.
Something else that also defeats me about thus is that here we have an organisation complaining about having to many customers. It's bizarre.
Lola, the ideal number of customers for any state-run organisation is always zero. Customers only make life difficult for the management.
B.:-)
Post a Comment