Thursday, August 17, 2006

Health service

Although I'm sure someone will be able to justify it somehow, I refuse to believe - and, I don't care how reasonable your argument is it will NOT sway me - that there is any way to justify demanding that a patient come into the hospital on a Tuesday for a procedure on the following Monday because 'otherwise the bed will go to someone else'. {Yes, this does happen.} I could, possibly, be persuaded that Sunday evening might be necessary, but making someone spend 5 extra days in the hospital to suit some administration requirement is an almost immoral waste of resources as well as being inconvenient for the patient and, possibly, health-threatening given all the MRSA risk.

When things like this are no longer happening then I'll start to wonder if the public health service is under-funded. For now it's pretty clear that the system is so badly managed as to make all discussion of funding nonsensical.