NHS and the discharge of patients

At last the National Health Service is doing something about the abhorrent practice of discharging patients at night and have issued the following press statement by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh Medical Director of the NHS.
 

"While some patients may of course choose to be discharged during these hours, the examples highlighted of elderly patients being left to make their way home by themselves in the middle of the night are obviously unacceptable, and need to be addressed urgently... As health professionals we all agree that patients should be treated with compassion, so it is simply not acceptable to send people home from hospital late at night when they may have no family members nearby to support them".

This situation should not have been allowed to happen in the first place. You do not need a degree in nursing or a doctorate in medical science to realise that  discharging patients outside of normal working hours is unacceptable regardless of their age or whether family or friends are available to help them or not. This practice should be stopped immediately and there is no need for a review. The hospital staff should know better. It is obvious that this practice has to stop and there is no need for a consultation period. I fear that the practice will be allowed to continue and 75 year old men will be still  discharged, at inconvenient hours, into the care of their 70 year old wives. You can see this happening by reading between the lines of the PR statement.

Once again, of course, we are treated to a PR statement in flowery language which does nothing to tackle the problem that some people working in the NHS do not care about the patients. No matter how much money we spend there will be no improvement in care whilst the attitude remains that patients can be discharged from hospitals as if they are vegetables being dispatched to a supermarket warehouse.

It is time for patients to be treated with all the dignity that human beings can be afforded. The tone of the PR release does not fill me full of confidence that the problem of inadequate care throughout the health service will be addressed quickly. It sounds as if inadequate care is not regarded as a problem but more of a "challenge" to be hidden away on a checklist.

Hospital and NHS reorganisations will fail if management are unable to realise that patient care should be the top priority and not the bottom one.It is clearly time for a change of attitude and some down to earth thinking rather than management theory and PR speak.