Too clinical to care?

Mike Thompson

Yesterday I was dismayed to see the National Patient Safety Agency issue a warning to NHS hospitals that patients might die if they aren’t given their medicines on time. It says that over the past three years there have been more than 90 reports of death or severe harm attributable to missed doses in England and Wales.

What makes this even worse is that hospitals have been given a year to act on the alert. The NPSA’s own figures suggest that this means that, so far as the NHS is concerned, it’s OK for a further 30 people to suffer serious harm, or die, because no-one could be bothered to give them their treatment properly.

Perhaps those who set these deadlines should put themselves in the shoes of the relatives of those 30 patients and ask why no-one did anything to stop it happening.

Medicines aren’t the only part of treatment to fall foul of failures to provide basic care. Reports that patients with limited mobility have gone hungry because meals have been left out of reach are not unknown.

There is no evidence to support my contention, but could it be that professional aspirations mean that members of the caring professions are becoming so concerned with clinical, or managerial, development that we’re forgetting about the basic provision of care?

It’s starting to look as though admission to hospital has become more important than actually looking after and treating people once they are there.