Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Yah, sure, you betcha, I want one just like that!

First, we had the Canadian provincial premier of Newfoundland exhibiting a bad case of south of the borderitis but that didn't slow down the Obamacrats agitating for Obamacare. No sirree, Bob!

Do you think this latest report on patient safety orders in the NHS will have any effect?

The Guardian reports that:

• 25 NHS organisations have not ­confirmed compliance with an NPSA safer-practice notice designed to reduce the risk of patients ­falling out of bed. It was issued after about 90 patients who rolled out of bed on to the floor in ­hospitals, mental health and learning disability units, fractured their neck or femur; 11 of them died.

• 81 hospitals and other care providers had not taken the "required actions" outlined in patient safety alerts covering opioid (painkilling) medicines. The alert was originally issued in July 2008 with a deadline of January 2009; the 81 had not complied by 29 December 2009.

• 10 NHS trusts have not said they have complied with a February 2005 alert on nasogastric feeding tubes, which can sometimes be wrongly placed into the lungs during insertion. Errors involving the feeding tubes caused at least 11 deaths before the alert came out, according to the NPSA.

In other words, 81 hospitals and other care facilities in the UK still do not have standard safety measures in place like, oh say, BEDRAILS! 10 NHS trusts (regional administrative units) still have not required their hospitals, etc. to comply with training/education which prevents their practitioners from inserting NG feeding tubes into the lungs instead of the stomach!

These are ordinary standards of care which, if violated in this country, no hospital receiving any sort of government funding through medicare, etc. would be allowed to keep its doors open if they didn't have little things like bed rails and adequate training on NG tube insertion. And say, oh, safe administration of opioid painkillers.

But yeah, we want this sort of care in our country. right.

1 comment:

FeatherBlade said...

One would think that if they can't put rails on the beds to keep peole from falling out, that they would lower the beds so there's a shorter distance to fall.

But it's not as though this doesn't already happen in the United States too: My great-grandmother fell out of her bed in the nursing home and was injured, but the nursing home refused to put bedrails on because that would be "improper confinment and restraint of a patient."

They put padding on the floor instead.