YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS CRAP UP: EU REGS MAKING NHS EVEN WORSE!

TELEGRAPH: [EU Mandated] Cuts in doctors' hours 'putting patients at risk'

Patients are being put at risk due to cuts in doctors' working hours meaning there are more shift handovers, a defence organisation has warned.

As doctors' hours have been cut under the European Working Time Directive, more shifts have been introduced to compensate. But this means there are more handovers between shifts when doctors have to brief the new team about the condition of the patients on the wards.

This can lead to mistakes and errors if the new team is not properly informed about what actions have been taken, what drugs have been ordered and which patients are known to have deteriorated.

Research has revealed that the more handovers doctors do the more information they forget.

The Working Time Directive has been controversial by cutting the number of hours junior doctors can work from 56 to 48. This will affect the quality of training, the experience of consultants in the next ten years and ability of the NHS to provide enough doctors to treat patients effectively, some have argued.

EU + NHS = DEATH, NAY GENOCIDE.

YUP: THESE NANNYSTATE UTOPIANISTS ARE KILLING PEOPLE LEFT AND RIGHT.

AS THEY ALWAYS HAVE.

A PRIVATELY RUN PRIVATELY PAID FOR SYSTEM WOULD BE BETTER FOR EVERYONE.

AS PUNDITARIAN POSTED HERE (3/29/10):

The incentives of private medicine favor the patient; the incentives of government health care favor the bureaucrats

How best to describe the difference between private medicine, in which we seek out, "hire," and pay our own doctors, on the one hand, and a government-run public clinic system, on the other? Here are a few words of wisdom from a man who knew both systems:

"In a private fee-for-service medical system, a dead patient is a revenue loss. In the National Health Service (UK), a dead patient was a cost savings."

So said the late Harry Bailey, MD.

Who was he?

The above quote is from my late father. He had a very unique perspective on the practice of medicine, especially as it relates to the various delivery systems. He was born and brought up in England and entered medical school there in 1950, training under the National Health Service and graduating in 1956. He emigrated to the US in 1957 and went into private practice for 24 years, 8 years pre-Medicare and the period after until 1981, becoming a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical school and a US Citizen along the way. In 1982 he decided he wanted to give something back to his adopted country in gratitude for the wonderful opportunities it had given him, so he joined the US Navy at age 52 and served first as the head of the Radiology residency program (27 residents and the largest program in the military) and then Chairman of the Radiology Department at the Balboa Naval Regional Medical Center in San Diego until his retirement at the rank of captain in 1991.

SOCIALISM DOESN'T JUST SUCK: IT KILLS.