There seems to be a lot of unenviable and disgusting behavior in the organisation laughably referred to as ‘the envy of the world’ .
From a BBC report:
More than 35,000 incidents of sexual misconduct or sexual violence – ranging from derogatory remarks to rape – were recorded on NHS premises in England between 2017 and 2022.
Rape, sexual assault or being touched without consent accounted for more than one in five cases.
Most incidents – 58% – involved patients abusing staff.
The data was collected by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Guardian, and shared with BBC File on 4.
Freedom of Information requests were received from 212 NHS trusts in England.
The data that came back from trusts showed at least 20% of incidents involved rape, sexual assault or inappropriate physical contact – including kissing. Other cases included sexual harassment, stalking and abusive or degrading remarks. One in five cases involved patients abusing other patients – although not all trusts provided a detailed breakdown.
One former patient told File on 4 how she had been sexually assaulted by a male patient while she had been showering in a hospital.
“The door flew open and there was a man in the doorway,” said Mary (not her real name). “I screamed as I had no clothes on. He ran towards me and shouted ‘I’ll have some of that’.”
When the man grabbed her arm, she explained, she “managed to elbow him and push him away”.
“I was trying to run and cover myself with my hands and parts of my body because there’s everybody staring.”
Let’s all applaud the NHS shall we and rejoice over a healthcare system that if it doesn’t kill or injure you from incompetence and excessive waits for treatment, puts its patients at risk of sexual assault.
So what do you propose ? Disband it and hand it over to Capita or Virgin or a US provider ?
Run it in a similar manner to how some EU countries run their healthcare systems. What’s obvious is that the NHS is not fit for purpose and we need a healthcare system that works for the patients and not just the staff. There should be some private provision but other services could as it is elsewhere be provided by the third sector, community management groups and even,where necessary local authorities. All should be funded via the National Insurance system with the money following the patient not the provider.
Yes, but there would need to be compatable assault figures from other healthcare systems not the ‘envy of the world’, as you put it. Until we have those figures available our domestic issue although serious should not be taken totally out of context.
Been doing some digging into this and can’t find any comparable figures from either the Dutch or the German healthcare systems. America has a problem with violent crime in hospitals but the data that I can find on this is patchy. There have been rogue doctor sex assault scandals in Germany but I don’t seem to be able to find information that paints the German healthcare system as being anything like as bad as the NHS.