Tag Archives: NHS
‘Dangerous and flawed’: sacked minister Paul Burstow’s verdict on hospital cuts
Former health minister Paul Burstow launched a withering attack today on “dangerous” plans to cut hospital services in London.
07 September 2012
Hours after losing his government job, he told the Standard that a plan to axe a casualty and maternity unit in south-west London put patient safety at risk. In a wide-ranging interview the Liberal Democrat MP urged new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to “bin” the proposals, and warned they were likely to lead to “more mothers giving birth in the back of their car”.
He also proposed changes to stop rail fares from spiralling.
Mr Burstow, 50, was born at St Helier hospital, which serves his Sutton and Cheam constituency but is now set to lose its A&E and maternity units under plans drawn up by health chiefs.
He dismissed the strategy as fundamentally flawed and warned it would also damage health services in Kingston and Croydon, as their hospitals would have to cope with more patients.
Nurses are being forced to clean toilets and mop hospital floors on top of their patient care duties
- More than half of NHS nurses say cleaning services for their ward are inadequate
- One in five say their trust has cut back on cleaning in the last year
By Rob Preece
PUBLISHED: 01:38, 4 September 2012 | UPDATED: 08:52, 4 September 2012
Nurses looking after patients in hospitals have also been forced to disinfect toilets and mop floors as hard-up NHS trusts cut spending on cleaning.
More than half of NHS nurses told researchers that they believed cleaning services for their ward were inadequate, with about a fifth saying their hospital trust had made cuts in the last year.
The survey of 1,000 nurses and health assistants revealed a third had cleaned toilets or mopped floors in the last 12 months.
Burden: A ward is deep-cleaned at the Royal Free Hospital in London. A survey suggests that NHS nurses across the country are having to carry out more and more cleaning tasks themselves
Some also reported having to clean corridors, computers, nursing stations and offices.
Two in five respondents said they had cleaned a bed area or single room vacated by a patient who was infectious.
Four in five said they had performed the same task following the discharge of a non-infectious patient.
Worryingly, almost three quarters of respondents said they had not been trained for such cleaning practices.
One in five patients ‘harmed’ in some hospitals
One in five patients in some NHS hospitals suffer harm due to avoidable accidents, complications and mistakes, it has emerged.
The data has been assembled via a monthly series of snapshots, gathered by frontline clinical staff since April
By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor
6:00AM BST 31 Aug 2012
Official NHS data has shown that more than 20 per cent of patients in some organisations suffer from problems such as bed sores or suffer accidents such as falls while on wards.
Nationally just under one in ten, or around 41,000 people, were harmed, but this masks wide variation in individual hospitals, it was found.
The Department of Health has set a target to deliver “harm-free care” to 95 per cent of patients “by 2012”.
Officials admitted around 200,000 patients suffer common avoidable problems over the course of a year.
The NHS Safety Thermometer, launched in April, gathers data from all NHS hospitals covering patient problems such as bed sores and patient falls that can be avoided with good care.
