NHS saves hundreds... but kills thousands!

This morning I posted about the propose organ harvesting scheme proposed by the UK Government. In it I included a link to Polly Toynbee's diatribe on the Guardian website in support of it. In it she has the following line

"It is deeply shocking that hundreds of thousands of lives have been blighted or lost over the past decades for no better reason than a few vociferous people's misguided and primitive instincts about the sanctity and integrity of corpses."

Well I wonder how that comments sits with the claim that 17,000 deaths a year in the UK are unnecessary and due to nothing more than poor NHS performance?

The NHS is wasteful and inefficient my wife works in the NHS and knows only to well how much the bureaucracy has increased, instead of letting the hospitals decide what they need to spend the money on to increase performance the Government continually force them to spend it on headline grabbing initiatives. For every headline about waiting lists there seems to be two or more about MSRA or unnecessary deaths.

Oh and on the subject of infections at hospitals I wonder how many victims will get £5 million payouts? Not many as Peter Walsh, of the group Action against Medical Accidents, said: "

Thousands of people are gravely affected or even killed by avoidable hospital acquired infections every year. However, the continuing restriction of legal aid means that very few people can afford even to have their case investigated."

It seems the compensation paid to Leslie Ash has caused outrage in some quarters

"The £5 million paid out is equivalent to the total paid out in compensation to all MRSA victims in the last four years.

It would pay for 250 specialist intensive care unit nurses for a y ear, 230 year-long courses of Herceptin breast cancer treatment, 6,578 doses of a drug which could save the eyesight of 137 people, six MRI scanners, or 70 consultants for a year."

A very sorry state of affairs indeed.