Friday 6 March 2015

Hospitals and targets

I do wonder what government targets achieve these days especially in hospitals.

As someone with a neurological illness,  the thought of going into hospital for any period of time fills me with dread these days, because I have got to the stage where I don't trust them anymore. 

Yes I know that things are getting better than they were, but there is less thought about personalised care these days, it's all about government targets, which in many cases make things a lot worse than they were before. 

Everywhere we look we see or hear about government targets whether it is the police forces across the UK or in the National Health Service, but I cannot believe in all honesty that they prove or achieve anything.

The health service and hospitals went down the pan, when the doctors and matrons were stopped from running things properly, because at the end of the day these people are trained to know all about the health service, while putting patients first.

Now these places are run by Chief Executive Officers, who whether we like it or nor know little or nothing about the health service, and are just there to reduce costs, and make money for the hospital owners, which in most cases are private companies running our hospitals at an alarming cost to the patients.

I never understood why the system was changed in the first place, apart from the fact that many hospitals were under funded and left in a very bad state of repair, so much so that the only way out was to allow companies to use hospital grounds to build their own new hospitals on, and put their own bosses in place.

The objection I have to these chief executives is that they are not accountable to anyone, and when there are problems in a hospital it's never their fault so they never get sacked. 

If they ever get removed they get golden handshakes, including bonuses just for the privilege of failing to do their job properly. It's the nurses and doctors etc who always get the blame, because they are simply following orders from above.

If things went wrong in years gone by people were accountable to the hospital or regional board, but now that has gone.

Surely if the hospital chief executive did his or her job correctly, we would not need targets. 

When we look at it, a hospital board usually ran a group of hospitals etc, unlike today where each hospital is independant and has its own independant chief executive and his staff of managers. 

Perhaps we have a lot to learn by going back to the days where everyone in the health service was qualified in the health service and each individual was accountable.  

Because whether we liked it or not, a matron and a doctor usually know more about health than some imported industrial chief executive.

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