This week Canada's top doctor announced that the Canadian system is "imploding."
Doctors are meeting in Saskatoon to discuss changes that must be made.
The Canadian Press reported, via the Drudge Report:
The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.
Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.
"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
"We know that there must be change," she said. "We're all running flat out, we're all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands."
British NHS like Abu Ghraib? [Link]
I had cancer and the NHS saved my life. I'm extremely pleased to be alive, and I'm very, very grateful. But the process, it has to be said, lacked grace.
I will not bore you now with the contradictory statements by consultants, or the three-hour waits for appointments that were cancelled, or the invitations to appointments for dates which had passed. I won't bore you with the lost files, and the lost X-rays, and the mammogram that turned out to be an X-ray of an ankle, or the surgeon who told me that he thought my approach to a mastectomy (which I didn't, in the end, have) was "a bit heavy". I won't bore you with the nurses who sighed and sulked and were soldered to their chairs, apart from the one who asked me, in a rare fit of bewildered humanity, why I was crying. Er, because I've got cancer and I'm still in my 30s? A teensy bit upsetting, non?
But I will tell you this. The big problem with the NHS is the people in it. Maybe they start out wanting to help their fellow human beings, to lift them, as our dear leader says, from pain to comfort, from despair to hope. Maybe they fill out a form in triplicate (two of which get lost) saying that they want to help people, and get sent off to training schools: the consultants to one where they learn to flick through a file with a sense of harried self-importance and turn to you briefly and sneer; the receptionists to one where they learn to regard the arrival of a patient as a nasty intrusion in a nice day's chatting, and one to be punished with a lengthy wait; and the nurses... It would be frivolous to mention Abu Ghraib. But tempting.
Diagnosing patients over the phone? [Link]
Meanwhile, the NHS is killing people by “diagnosing” ailments by phone…
Karl Hartey accused the Government of having ‘blood on its hands’ after his 16-year-old daughter Charlotte died from complications arising from tonsillitis. The case will further increase concerns that illnesses, some of them serious, are increasingly being misdiagnosed as swine flu.
Following revelations that 16-year-olds are being employed at a swine flu call centre, there are also fears that many of those doling out advice and the anti-viral drug Tamilfu are not qualified to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment