Following up on my post, National Health Care in Britain Responsible for 40,000 Preventable Deaths, Pays 15 Million Pounds to Silence Whistleblowers, I want to point to what Richard Fernandez writes about in The Hospital of Death
The man at the center of the scandal was Sir David Nicholson, the Chief Executive of the NHS.
Nicholson is a man who never held a job in his life outside of government and activism. “Nicholson joined the NHS on graduation, and then the Communist Party of Great Britain”. Nor was he just a casual, student Red. Nicholson, according to the Guardian, was a “tankie”, a “term referring to those members of the Communist Party of Great Britain that followed the Kremlin line, agreeing with the crushing of revolts in Hungary and later Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks; or more broadly, those who followed a traditional pro-Soviet position.” And rung by rung this compassionate man climbed the ladder of the NHS until he reached its pinnacle.
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One of the biggest concentrations of deaths was at an “elite” hospital, the Mid-Staffordshire hospital which triggered an investigation by the “apparently high mortality rates in patients admitted as emergencies”. Too many people were turning up dead. A study subsequently showed that up to 1,200 patients may have died due to negligence in the “elite” hospital, which has since become so notorious it may now be placed under new management.
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when the report touches on what actually happened to the patients it is the stuff of war-crimes. It is not an exaggeration to say that nothing suggested by the most rabid critics of Guantanamo is half so bad. Baldly put what really happened in the hospital was that thousands of old Britons were left to starve, die of thirst, stew in their waste for extended periods, lie neglected and unmedicated or cast out of the wards at the slightest opportunity.
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For strange as it may seem, NHS head Sir David Nicholson, of whom nobody may have previously heard, ran the fifth largest organization in the world. The NHS is far bigger than the British Army, larger than the Indian Railways and the Chinese state-owned energy network. Sir David Nicholson’s fiefdom is actually exceeded only by McDonald’s, Walmart, the US Armed Forces, the Chinese Army and the Chinese railway and may have inflicted more deaths than all of these organizations combined.
It's the unaccountability of these government ministers that rankles me the most. Nicholson will find a way to absolve himself of any responsibility much as the way no one in the U.S. government is responsible for the debacle in Benghazi.
By contrast, look at what happened when the management was turned over to a private firm. Transformed: The failing NHS trust taken over by private firm has one of the highest levels of patient satisfaction
Hinchingbrooke, a hospital in Cambridgeshire with 160,000 patients, was on the verge of going bust when it was taken over by Circle last year.Posted by Jill Fallon at March 6, 2013 12:48 PM | Permalink
But NHS figures show it is now ranked as one of the highest for patient happiness and waiting times.
Patient satisfaction: Hinchingbrooke Hospital, the first NHS trust to be run entirely by a private firm, is ranked as one of the highest for patient happiness and waiting times
The company running the trust has slashed losses at the hospital by 60 per cent and will soon begin to pay off burgeoning debts built up over years of mismanagement. The takeover deal, which saved the hospital from closing down, is seen as a blueprint for the future of many NHS trusts.