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A recent BBC article (2016) reports that The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has yet again found “chaotic “ and “unacceptable risks to patients”, this time against the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust.
It is all too frequent these days to hear that hospitals have provided inadequate care and treatment to their patients. Inspectors found “on 11 occasions, there were no ambulances available to respond to 999 calls” which is surely going to lead to a deterioration of health and unnecessary deaths. Over the last 20 years I have dealt with similar cases myself and all too often these delays and chaos has led to irreparable damage or fatalities.
Whether the chaos has been caused because of inadequate “in house” procedures which are in turn adding to the extreme pressures faced by nursing staff, as suggested in the BBC report, remains to be seen. It is obviously necessary for doctors to complete a large amount of documentation and perhaps this is taking more time away from them dealing with their patients.
Leaving vulnerable and ill patients in corridors or failing to respond to 999 calls is clearly unacceptable. However, it would appear that Chief Executives of hospitals are perhaps being made “scapegoats”, the Chief Executive of the Portsmouth Hospital NHS having resigned within months of the adverse CQC report. Surely Chief Executives’ actions are governed by the amount of limited resources given to them?
May be the BBC report should be looking at the government’s failure to invest more money into improving the situation in an already stretched and chaotic NHS, although this sounds ironic coming from a clinical negligence lawyer who is provided with an abundance of work looking into their failures and delays.
The lack of resources, the lack of doctors and the procedures and documents to be put into place when somebody is admitted to hospital is clearly causing problems. I have dealt with hundreds of clients over the years and one of the main complaints against hospitals and/or doctors relate to delays, resulting in their care and treatment being inadequate.
However, to implement changes set out by the CQC will take time and I think that the BBC article quite rightly realises that hospitals “cannot solve this problem on its own and will need support from other local health and social care services”, although these other health service bodies are also stretched and unless investment is made I cannot see any progress being made within different health Trusts.
To read the full article, click here.
