The Horrors of the National Health Service

Next up from the people who brought you the DMV... Health care!

From OpenMarket.org's blog section on health care reform, a few stories from Britain's "free health care paradise"...

This is not good:

An expectant mother gave birth on a hospital assessment room floor because busy staff failed to put her in a maternity unit bed.

Lynne Neilson had been waiting for two-and-a-half hours when she went into labour standing up, clutching the side of a trolley.

A midwife who arrived just as her daughter Orla’s head appeared put down a disposable mat, caught the baby and unwound the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

Even then, Mrs Neilson had to wait a further hour before being transferred to the labour ward.

Then there's this one:

A cancer patient given less than two months to live has been refused a life-prolonging drug until an NHS trust finishes a month-long investigation.

And:

Large numbers of people are going without dental treatment and some even report extracting their own teeth because they cannot find an NHS dentist in their area, a survey reveals today.

Even worse:

So imagine my shock when I saw how some nurses recently treated my elderly aunt.
Annie was a stoical Yorkshire woman, and a devout Christian; she’d dedicated her life to helping others, training as a nurse and midwife before moving to Africa, where she set up several hospitals and nursing schools.

She was so committed to helping the poor that she undertook a postgraduate study on kwashiorkor - a muscle-wasting tropical disease caused by malnutrition.

Yet, with appalling irony, 50 years later my aunt spent her twilight months wasting away in an NHS hospital - as a result of malnutrition. Only this time the cause was a very British disease: neglectful care.

...

Nurses consistently failed to wash her for months, feed her or give her anything to drink - basics that any patient should expect. By the time my aunt was discharged into a nursing home - frail and disorientated -she weighed just 36kg.

...

Even though I knew she had been becoming more dependent on others before this, I was shocked by what I found when I visited her: she was slumped sideways in a large chair, with her hair unkempt and in a gown four sizes too big.

Part of the gown had fallen off her right shoulder, exposing her naked chest in full view of the patient in the bed next to her - an elderly man.

I was very upset, but when I complained to the nurse in charge, she just shrugged her shoulders.