Lord Mancroft is right when he describes those who cared for him in hospital as 'dirty, drunken, and promiscuous'. I'm sure they were dirty and I'm sure they did talk over him about innappropriate topics: this is standard in much of the NHS today.
However, he was wrong about one key thing. They were not nurses. He was almost certainly descibing 'Health Care Assistants' - what we used to call Auxilliary nurses. They used to provide support care under the direction of ward nurses. Now, of course, they do all the nursing while the real nurses are chained to their desks filling out forms.
The Managers are not happy, though:
NHS managers are so fucking predictable. They always come out with the same shit.
Oh, and the 'evidence' for the poor care is the testimony of the thousands of patients every day. Fuckwit.
However, he was wrong about one key thing. They were not nurses. He was almost certainly descibing 'Health Care Assistants' - what we used to call Auxilliary nurses. They used to provide support care under the direction of ward nurses. Now, of course, they do all the nursing while the real nurses are chained to their desks filling out forms.
The Managers are not happy, though:
Chief executive James Scott said ... no complaint had been made at the time of the stay, last August.
Mr Scott said: "I believe it is wrong to make allegations like this without putting any evidence before us or giving us the opportunity to respond."
NHS managers are so fucking predictable. They always come out with the same shit.
Oh, and the 'evidence' for the poor care is the testimony of the thousands of patients every day. Fuckwit.
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The good lord should fuck off back to BUPA, where he will no doubt get a better class off over the bed conversation, and think himself very lucky that anyone bothered to look after the ignorant arogant fuckwit. I heard this prat being interviewed by Jeremy Vine at lunchtime... all i can say is where was Nurse Allit and Dr Shipman when he was on the ward......
Beverley Allitt murdered kids, actually, but I'm sure with a validated Darzist conversion cause to adult nursing, she could be returned to effective practice.
I don't know the details or the veracity of Lord Mancroft's allegations.
However from my own experience of the quality of nursing received by my terminally ill mother while she was in hospital; most nurses have either not been trained properly to nurse, or do not wish to. I worked with nurses about 20 years ago and most of them would be ashamed of the negligence displayed by those in charge of my mother's care. Lord Mancroft may well be all those things that Nurse Ratchet accuses him of- but did anyone actually bother to "look after" him while he was in hospital? I wonder.
Would anyone want to look after the ignorant arsewipe......?
I agree that the standard and professionalism of the nursing profession currently in some casa has a lot to be desired but this wankshite was simply using the opportunity for political point scoring - bringing up an incident from last year..... if he was that bothered about it he should have complained there and then....rather than comming out with some frankly bizzare if not misguided and certainly offensive ramblings today.
I'm a tad more incensed by the use of his political position to table a personal observation with no backing and a more then obvious underlying purpose that has nothing to do with health care improvement. His failure to utilise the proper complaints procedure and worse still - to leave it for a year? Obviously he's not really that bothered by it.
He is probably too busy fist fucking Lord Karzi......
The sooner they do away with the nursing home that has become the house of lords the better.......
Read Mancroft's actual speech instead of carefully distorted excerpts.
He goes to some lengths to praise the next NHS hospital he went to. He works for several health charities. The hospital he complains about has received other complaints about staff swearing at patients and other less than wonderful habits.
And furthermore, Nurse Ratchet, anyone who has experienced NHS hospitals for the last 40 yrs, as I have, knows that there are always some nursing/auxiliary staff around who are a disgrace to the profession, and pretending they don't exist just exacerbates the matter.
Matters have worsened with Project 2000, and I could certainly give you frequent recent examples in our local Trust of the 'too posh to wash' brigade, plus bullying of auxiliaries by said nurses.
And as far as complaining at the time, read his speech and you will learn that he was seriously ill, which was why his wife got him transferred to the Chelsea&Westminster - so just maybe getting him sorted was more important than putting in a complaint.
I complained recently to a deputy Matron about the nursing care of a bed-ridden, seriously ill family member. She was terribly apologetic, explained how overworked she was (I don't doubt it), and nothing improved.
And perhaps, tainted halo, you'd like to explain what his underlying motive was - crucifying the NHS? Again, read his speech and you'll see the truth.
Glad to see how thoughtful and sensitive most of the posters are here - if you are illustrative of current medics, no wonder so many hospitals are providing shit service.
I've been in various wards in local hospitals in the last few years. The quality of care and accommodation varied enormously within the same hospital. Some nurses were fine (especially those in blue uniforms), but some of the others (care assistants? how can you tell?) appeared to be sleepwalking. Some of my clothes were lost and some nearly so.
So the thought of a man dying alone in an NHS hospital has upset the belted Lord, eh ?
(see Mancrofts full speech).
Perhaps one of his fellow hereditary peers should have tapped him on his ermine padded shoulder and warned him about the increasing hospitalisation of death - one study found an almost 80%-20% split, with the overwhelming majority now dying in institutional settings.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1552067
Perhaps if the old Etonian had ventured into one or two of the rather more disreputable care homes he would soon realise there is a growing army of elderly and demented patients who seem to spend their blighted lives shuffling between the day room, lavatory and bedroom - and from there, of course, they are delivered to the 'promiscuous' hospital nurses once a chest infection, UTI or stroke renders them too debilitated to maintain their circumscribed routine.
Assuming of course there is space to pack another one in given that the NHS has just about the lowest number of beds in Western Europe (because we value 'productivity' so much, we have dispensed with the need for things like properly equipped wards, or safe nurse-patient ratios, etc).
Of course Mancroft is not remotely interested in any of these issues, at least not until he is directly affected by them himself.
By the way Dougal I wonder if Leslie Ash has such a high opinion of the Chelsea and Westminster, wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the hospital had to shell out £5mil after the she suffered a hospital aquired infection (cue predictable media reports about filthy hospitals,etc - but hang on, wasn't Mancroft saying that the C&W was spotless)
I wonder what the Lord would have said had he suffered a similar fate to Ms Ash ?
Well, A&E Charge Nurse, I expect Mancroft is somewhat interested in health matters, since he is involved with health charities, but perhaps you know him personally and are able to utter such comments about him with backup knowledge?
And no, I didn't think much of C&W, since my daughter had a disastrous maternity experience there 6yrs ago, as did a couple of her friends.
But maybe C&W has sorted out their act since then?
No, I do not know the reformed heroin addict personally, Dougal - but his COMMENTS are now a matter of public record.
In fact, when sober, Mancroft seems to have previous form when it comes to criticising the NHS
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3462808.ece
I like your phrase 'interested in health matters' I'm sure Mancroft must spend hours at Pratts club boring his mates about the finer points of nursing on an over crowded NHS ward - oh, to be a fly on the wall when the belted Lord is expounding his arcane theories about life on the frontline.
Ah, so it's a class thing, basically. If you ain't a horny-handed son of the soil, you can't have an opinion, and completely uninformed commenters can cast aspersions as freely as they like.
By 'interested in health matters', I meant that he spends a lot of time helping to raise funds for health charities, and is the director of two organisations helping drug addicts.
But of course, you know that he spends all the time at his Club, getting drunk, despite the fact that you don't know him at all. And no, neither do I.
No, I don't think it is a class thing, Dougal - even his own party have distanced themselves from his snidey comments, in fact apart from who his Dad was why should Mancroft have any kind of platform at all ?
Incidentally, I can't help thinking of Smashy & Nicey when it comes to fallen micro-celebs getting involved in 'charidee' - Mancroft, attends a few functions on the money raising circuit, big deal.
I'll tell you what, I'd be willing to sponsor him a pound an hour to work on an under-staffed acute admissions ward, or perhaps do a few night shifts in a residential home - how much do you think he would raise........£2 ?
Dirty Drunk and promiscuous?
Let me at em!
So am I
You simply don't get it, do you A&E nurse?
Let's try a different perspective - the police have a difficult, unpleasant and dangerous job to do, they have to know a lot about the law without being trained barristers or judges, they are supposed to be tough but also caring when necessary, and they are drowning in paperwork. Does this sound familiar to you?
But there are clearly times when individuals, groups and in some cases a complete Force are explicitly incompetent and occasionally corrupt. Straightforward procedures are ignored, a few quid get passed quietly from hand to hand, and the public ends up suffering, sometimes fatally. Remember de Menezes?
If you were an ordinary 'man in the street' who had suffered from bad policing, would you be pleased or sorry that someone had used their status to publicly say 'the same thing has happened to me, one particular group of policemen in Barsetshire behaved completely unprofessionally, but another group in Bunbletown came to the rescue and sorted out the problem.'
Or would you be happy that policeman commented 'no-one should criticise the police, let's really slag off the guy who said this, the police are all wonderful, they've got such a difficult job to do, bet the critic couldn't handle 2 drunks on a Saturday night, etc etc'.
Because to me, it sounds like you would rather slag off someone of whom you are almost completely ignorant than deal with the facts of his criticism. I could bore you with far too many examples of nurse behaviour currently and 40yrs ago that mirror Mancroft's comments. Currently, senior nurses have complained to me that they are unable to properly discipline lax staff, and that too many nurses in their 20s and 30s are in the job simply as a stepping stone to management jobs. Are they lying? Am I lying?
"However, he was wrong about one key thing. They were not nurses. He was almost certainly descibing 'Health Care Assistants' - what we used to call Auxilliary nurses. They used to provide support care under the direction of ward nurses. Now, of course, they do all the nursing while the real nurses are chained to their desks filling out forms."
You have no evidence of this, and neither do I. However, I experienced something very similar when I was in hospital, and the staff concerned were bank nurses (RGNs), not HCAs.
Dougal, we appear to have hi-jacked this thread ;o)
Anyway, I instictively bristle at the 'things were better 40yrs ago' line - I'm sure millions of little Inglunders, viewed the legalisation of abortion, decriminilisation of homosexuality, not to mention wimmins-lib (and public bra burning) as the final nail(s) in the collapse of British empire.
Don't forget Enoch Powell's "rivers of shit" speech was made in April 1968, exactly 40yrs ago.
If the Bath scrubbers, sorry, nurses were unprofessional then why did the belted Lord not pursue this matter at the time.
The Royal United Hospital Bath certainly seemed to be struggling if we look at the 2005/06 Commission for Health Improvement report but most Chief Exec's tend to pay particular attention when a politico pens a letter of complaint, Mancroft, it seems, couldn't be arsed back then.
So, why now - what is Mancrofts real agenda ?
In my experience many addicts become masters at both self-deception, as well as deceiving others, so perhaps the belted Lord does not even know himself.
And by the way if a grunt (at the end of a long dysfunctional process) is scapegoated, that tends to get on my tits, as well.
Look at the 90 deaths from the c-diff outrage at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells - x2 HCAs were sacked (I'm sure Mancroft would have been delighted at the thought of two fewer grubby slappers - because they were both female, of course) while chief exec, Rose Gibb, is fighting for her pay off despite attempting to whitewash the true extent of this dreadful tragedy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/11/ncdiff611.xml
Hallo, A&E Nurse -
I'm not sure I understand your points. I certainly don't think things were better 40yrs ago, just thinking about the state of the Maternity Home, and the attitude of most of the staff, where my wife had our first child 37 years ago still makes me feel sick.
And from reading comments across several blogs, it would appear there is a lot of support for Mancroft's comments from current and recent users of the Bath hospital.
I visited a friend this morning - she'd just come out of our local DGH. No problem with the doctors, but the loos were consistently filthy; the women's bays were situated at the opposite end of the ward from the women's loos (which on a renal unit ain't that much fun, and no member of staff stopped the male patients using the female ones) and no-one had thought of doing it a different way; uncapped jug of other patients' urine plopped down on her bed tray; and since my friend has been in and out of that hospital and one other in recent months, her comment was 'well, I can certainly recognise Mancroft's experiences.'
And as for Mancroft not being 'arsed' to complain - well, he was ill for some time afterwards, if you read what he said, and as I know full well from complaining on behalf of others, you simply don't get anywhere most of the time.
I simply don't understand your last point, but what you are still doing is shooting the messenger instead of reading the message. By the way, Rose Gibb is getting an obscene payoff because she resigned and it's in her contract. Just like her partner, Mark Rees, ex-Chief Exec of my local Hospital Trust, getting a smashing golden goodbye because he resigned just before the Accounts became public, showing a deficit that had risen from £14 to £28 mill, and has now elevated to £48 mill.
the good lord is 100% right
you fuckers in the nhs should go shoot yourselfs
total waste of public money the lot of you
scumbags and shitheads the lot
glad to see the view on the streets make it into parliament, see the heriditarys are good for some things
fuck the nhs, fuck the tossers in covernty pct the biggest cunts in the land, and fuck you lazy GPs
no one
No one is off his meds again.
no one
You are a grade A CUNT
Ill informed, incoherant ramblings which have no scope of critical thourght or progrssive debate.
Anon: Your opionion is testament to your own personal ignorance.
Expectations and emotions both run high when people have loved ones in hospital. I have had 23 operations (all NHS provided), my girlfriend was in hopsital for an operation, my sister delivered her baby (who then died 10 days later) in the same NHS hospital. The standard of care was very good. It can be easy to carried away by focusing on one or two bad points.
That the Lord may have had one bad experiance in ONE NHS hospital is exactly that. ONE. The C&W hospital is then commended, while posters here go on to trash it. Nurses say about the unsafe ratios, the problems of bad crowding of patients. Yet, where are these moaning people actually making the connection to the comments of the Nurses and the complaints of the patients?.
Yes, as a body of people it is very easy to say "What are we going to do about things". With the problems in the post and the comments, nobody has activly thourght "What am I going to do about it?"
Well, I shall say what I am going to do: The bloody best I can for my patients and their families. And if you dont think is good enough...well, you can just go phooie!
I am a student nurse, and now part time HCA (I used to be full time).
I find the lords comments disgraceful- how can one make such terrible assumptions based on one experience?
This that looked after him sound like a couple of bad eggs and any half decent HCA wouldn't dream of turning up to work hungover, dirty and discuss their sex lives over the patient.
Nurse Ratchet is doing a wonderful job at providing evidence for the good lord. I myself, as a genuine nurse who trained 25 years ago and is still working as a nurse, sadly believes everything he says.
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