Horror stories about the National Health Service come thick and fast, conveniently for a government that wants to hand it over to private capital. One week, it is chaos in A&E; the next, substandard care at 14 hospital trusts and old folk being ushered to an early grave by the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). We should treat these stories with scepticism even when they are apparently validated by official inquiries.
With all the talk of “excess deaths”, you would think that our hospitals had become killers. Yet, as the NHS medical director for England, Bruce Keogh, observes in his report on the 14 “failing” trusts, overall mortality in hospitals has fallen by about 30 per cent over the past decade.
Inquiries, however, rarely conclude that the problems they were set up to address don’t exist and they would be dismissed as whitewashes if they did. Given the emotion and fears surrounding serious illness and particularly death, it’s easy to find allegations of medical neglect. Julia Neuberger’s report on the LCP is replete with phrases such as “some people”, “many people” and “all too often”. There are no references to randomised sample surveys. The inquiry invited submissions from the public (it received 483), talked to 113 people at meetings and looked at hospital complaints. Such evidence should not be ignored but it is naturally biased towards those who suffered bad experiences.
No institution is perfect and anything involving medicine, which is as much an art as a science, will be more imperfect than most. What we don’t know is whether a health service run by private providers would be better.
I offer this snippet: in 2010, the US health department’s inspector general reported that 13.5 per cent of Medicare hospital patients suffered “harm” from “adverse events”, nearly half of them because of care failures. British newspapers love to highlight cases of “wrong-site surgeries”, in which ovaries are taken out instead of the appendix, for example. The United States has 40 of those a week; the UK has about 60 a year. The NHS has failings but they seem relatively few and, by international standards, very cheap.
Guilt by association
What’s in a name? The Neuberger report acknowledges that “many relatives” of patients on the LCP felt their loved ones had had “good deaths”. Yet it recommends dropping the term. “Pathway”, it argues, suggests patients being speeded directly to their coffins. I wonder if “Liverpool” isn’t the greater problem. Thanks partly to the Sun and Boris Johnson, the city has acquired negative associations in the past 25 years. Mention Liverpool and people think of poverty, unemployment, riots, too much drink and a declining football team.
Seen but not heard
The BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, says that he intends to stop actors muttering in the corporation’s dramas. If so, he will be performing a service to theatregoers as well as TV viewers. Actors, it seems, are no longer being taught to articulate their lines clearly and “throw” their voices, largely because the big money is now in TV, where authenticity is thought more important than audibility. Being deaf, I nearly always buy front-row seats at the theatre, but in the West End recently, we sat in the grand circle and my wife, whose hearing is perfect, complained that she couldn’t hear, either. Theatregoers should start a campaign and, at an agreed signal, stand in unison and shout: “Speak up!”
Social outcast
We hear much about how social media companies hold extensive databases on us that could be exploited by governments and corporations. We also hear about their inadequate controls over insulting comments. But I have not noticed discussion of their arbitrary power over users. I returned from holiday to find my Twitter account “suspended”, without warning or explanation. After a polite, emailed inquiry, I was told to look at the rules. I replied I couldn’t see how I had broken them. Two weeks later, someone at Twitter emailed me, saying, “It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from you,” and that “hopefully” the matter had been resolved. It certainly hadn’t, I replied. The account was restored a few days later, still without explanation or apology.
Being an old fogey, I use Twitter spasmodically and was not greatly inconvenienced by its loss. To some users, however, it has become an essential working tool. In a telling example of how technology can restrict rather than widen choice, many feel they must use it because their professional peers do so. We should know more about the Californian geeks who run social media and what redress they offer to those arbitrarily blackballed.
Analyse this
How could Ashton Agar, a 19-year-old cricketer playing his first Test and batting at No 11, make 98, the highest score of Australia’s first innings against England at Trent Bridge? The answer is that, since Agar had played only 16 unremarkable first-class innings, the England coaches, lacking videos of him, could offer bowlers no plans for getting him out. International sides now analyse opponents exhaustively. They produce pie charts, spreadsheets, graphs and other statistical paraphernalia, searching for a batsman’s weakness as assiduously as physicists searched for the Higgs boson. Even the best modern bowlers are robots, programmed by back-room boffins. Without the usual input, they malfunction.
Content from our partners
Related
