Following on from my last post about nursing numbers in Scotland I find this little piece. Nursing numbers to be cut by 13,000???? WTF? As the current vernacular has it. If you are working short staffed now, where are they going to make the cuts? Especially when you consider that we have an ageing population which is increasing as the baby boomers are only going to get sicker as they live longer and sicker patients need more resources, basic health economics I would have thought.

Recently we had the horror of Mid Stafford where over 1000 people may have died unnecessarily - why? Well here is a quote which may help point you in the right direction

"Over the years, many clinicians had noticed deterioration in the standards of patient care, which became particularly acute approximately three years ago when major cutbacks were made in staffing numbers. This included a ­savage reduction in the number of nursing staff."
The whole article can be found here.

So despite Scotland being criticised for having a higher nurse/doctor to patient ratios I hope we keep this and as health is a devolved issue as long as we can keep those Labour sycophants out we should be if not OK then at least a bit better. To think that Labour is supposed to be the party of the people, they are not the party of any people I know.


Thanks to Militant Medical Nurse.

NHS Scotland

According to this report NHS England is more efficient than the rest of the UK. What exactly is wrong with Scotland spending more per head on health care? Why is it bad to have more nurses and doctors and to keep people out of hospitals? A few years ago I studied for a management qualification and one of the points they tried to put over was that it was better to be effective than to be efficient in a business sense.
What surprises me is that even with these supposed extra resources we are still running short staffed, so what are English hospitals like?
A point I would also like to make is that these figures are now 3 years old and very out of date. They were gathered from a time when we had a labour government up here, now we have an SNP government things have improved and waiting times are nowhere as long as have been indicated. And being Scotland, we gather information differently from England so comparisons are not quite as straight forward.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year and is keeping well.