re: #184 Dark_Falcon

The British NHS is like the curate’s egg - good in parts. And the great majority of NHS employees at the clinical level are dedicated and try to do their best.

But there is a stifling bureaucracy, and endemic failures of management. Wards are not cleaned properly, there is queuing even for urgent medical tests, serious shortages of equipment.

In my own case, I was unaware I had been suffering cardiac fibrillation for months on end - my pulse had been racing at 200 a minute, very erratically, progressively weakening the heart muscle and damaging the mitral valve. I had seen my local GP on another matter - but he has about 8 minutes per patient, and did not check my blood pressure even though I am a pensioner. To him, I am just a number.

Anyway - I finally felt so ill I went to the local large hospital - and they saw that I was acutely ill. But no echocardiogram was available for 2 days, and the ward they put me on proved to be infected with MRSI or somesuch bug - it was obviously not clinically clean, anyone could see that.

Luckily one of my daughters works in the NHS and got me transferred by ambulance to a teaching hospital. I was put in a private room in view of the MRSI infection, and had an immediate echocardiogram, the FIRST proper diagnosis - followed by a top consultant stopping my erratic heart with those electric paddles and then letting it restart under its own normal sinus rhythm. But it might not have restarted.

My condition should have been diagnosed much earlier, I should not have caught a dangerous infection in hospital, and it was a disgrace that the first hospital was not able to check my condition properly. My view is that it was only thanks to my daughter’s intervention that I survived.

The NHS is a very hit-and-miss affair, and compares very badly with the care I have seen given to elderly friends in California. That is why I bridle at anyone who wants to transplant the NHS to the US. Of course some reforms are necessary - but not the Pelosi/Obama nonsense.