Yet again the National Health Service is in the news again for the wrong reasons. A nurse from Birmingham Children’s Hospital has been arrested for allegedly poisoning a newborn baby which later died. There have been no charges laid yet by the police or CPS against the accused 27 year old woman who was arrested for administering poison with the intent of endangering life. As charges have not yet been brought at the time of writing there is no name given for the person arrested as in the UK it is customary not to name suspects prior to charge and first appearance in the Magistrates Court.
The person arrested is just one of a long line of medics who worked in the NHS and who have either been accused or have been convicted of harming patients. There are of course the very well known cases of Dr Harold Shipman who murdered hundreds of his elderly patients along with the horrific case of nurse Beverley Allitt who is currently serving a life sentence for killing four babies and injuring many others whilst working at a hospital at a hospital in Lincolnshire. There is also the surgeon Ian Paterson who worked in both the NHS and the private sector and who carried out unnecessary breast operations on women in order to earn more fees and the numerous other cases where claims of fraud by NHS medical staff have been either alleged or proved. There are also other cases currently making their way through the courts such as the case of Lucy Letby an NHS nurse who is awaiting trial on charges of murdering eight babies and attempting to murder nine others whilst she was working at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Cheshire.
Whilst all organisations can or might contain rogue staff and in particular staff who are dangerous to others, the NHS appears to contain more than its fair share of such people and it seems to take some time to identify the wrong’uns who work for the NHS. These rogue staff only seem to be caught after they’ve killed someone or engaged in conduct so egregious that it cannot be ignored even by an NHS that appears to be run for the benefit of staff rather than the patients. To give a comparison: If an employee in a warehouse was behaving dangerously with a forklift truck then they could expect to be sacked pretty sharpish as it is in the financial interest of a private company to not have such employees working for them. However with the NHS bad and sometimes lethal staff are not dealt with in as timely manner as they should be dealt with. Because of the overly bureaucratic nature of the NHS that means that a dangerous member of staff could continue to have contact with patients when they should be either sacked outright or moved to a non-patient contact job whilst investigations are carried out. Also unlike in the private medical sector there is no penalty for hospitals having a poor reputation and bad staff as there is no competitor to the NHS that is readily available for most people and there is no external entity such as insurance companies watching medical staff like hawks to ensure that fraud and similar crimes are not carried out.
Again and again the NHS and its staff have shown that they are unworthy of praise and certainly unworthy of the mindless applause that too many Britons gave the NHS back in 2020.
F211, it is not just the BUS most of the public sector is like this. A classic example is two cops who took a two hour break during the night of the Manchester Arena bombing when at least one of them should have been present at the very spot the bomb went off.Their were each allowed an hour break separately but they both took two hours together. This is very gross misconduct which should demand their immediate dismissal but I bet they are still in the Police.
Yup. A lack of accountability, waste and piss poor quality staff is a problem throughout the public sector.
As an aside I was talking during the lockdowns to a self employed guy who works in East London. He said that the public sector workers in that area were loving the lockdowns. They were getting paid the same money for doing far less work and in some cases for doing no work at all. They were getting salaries for providing public sector services that they were plainly not providing. Those who worked in the private sector in that area at that time were having to work their bollocks off that is of course when there was work to be had. Private sector workers and the self employed were being bled dry via taxation to pay for council workers to sit on their arses on furlough.
The public sector as a whole is a complete mess stuffed full with lazy arsed buggers who would struggle to get jobs pushing brooms around in a warehouse.
Typo! NHS not BUS