Dead Baby Jokes
You know that wonderful medical utopia in the UK, where everyone gets all the super duper magical free healthcare they could ever need, and it’s paid for by fairies and unicorns? Well, it’s killing babies.
A devastating report on the state of Britain’s maternity services has concluded that they put the lives of women and their babies at risk.
The first national inquiry into maternity care by the Healthcare Commission, the NHS watchdog, has revealed a critical shortage of midwives, obstetricians absent from wards, a lack of beds and poor continuity of care. These have contributed to high death rates in some units and threaten the long-term health of mothers and their babies in others.
The inquiry, which is the largest ever carried out, involved all 150 NHS maternity units in England. It was triggered by separate full-scale investigations conducted at three trusts where mothers and babies died, which revealed failings indicative of a national pattern.
The three trusts were Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, where 10 mothers died between 2002 and 2005, New Cross in Wolverhampton, where three babies died in two months in 2003, and Ashford & St Peters in Surrey, where there was a series of serious incidents in 2000 and 2001.
The Healthcare Commission said the root cause of poor performance was weak leadership by managers and medical staff. Many trusts were critically short of midwives, with numbers ranging from 40 per 1,000 births in the best-staffed trusts to 25 per 1,000 in the worst.
Only two-thirds of trusts had a consultant present on their wards for 40 hours a week – the basic safety standard laid down by the Royal College of Obstetricians. The study also revealed a five-fold variation in the number of consultants among trusts, from 3.3 to 0.6 per 1,000 births. In some trusts this meant consultants were present on the wards for just 10 hours a week.
More than £660m was paid out by NHS trusts in the three years to 2007 in negligence cases for obstetric claims – enough to hire 1,000 extra consultant obstetricians. Maternity services account for one in 10 requests to the Healthcare Commission to investigate particular trusts. Today’s report, which included surveys of 5,000 staff and 26,000 mothers, says nine out of 10 mothers rated their care as good. But it said there were “significant weaknesses”, with wide variations in standards between trusts. Many of the problems identified in earlier investigations were widespread, suggesting that NHS trusts are not giving maternity services priority. Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the commission, said: “I don’t ever again want to be reading another report into high death rates at a maternity unit.”
It’s worth noting that this report comes from The Independent, one of Britain’s leftie papers. Ah, socialism. Guaranteeing the same equal level of misery and shitty treatment for everyone. (Except of course the rich, who can avoid the whole socialist disaster altogether by paying for private care themselves.)
Comments
excuse me...english is not my mother language so i may commit some mistakes (also when reading some articles..) , however i have pretty much understood all this article...now i have a normal question: even when you say you discovered all that UK stuff was not really what Moore said...isn´t it still a better choice for the US citizens to accept socialized health system? i mean… you all found some things going wrong in the UK, so, are the results for the normal rate of health of US better than the UK?, is people healthier in the US?
...i hope for an answer, because my comment´s intention is to eliminate my biggest enemy: ignorance.
Never let the facts get in the way of your stories:
Infant Mortality Rates:
US 8.27 Per 1000
UK 4.93 Per 1000
France 3.36 Per 1000
Source : US Govt (CIA) Website
All hail the great American Healthcare System!!
‘One Nation - Controlled by the Media’
I was about to add the exact comment above incidently on CNN.com there is a story about the US having the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world with only Latvia with 6 deaths per thousand being worse. Incidently my partner has had 2 babies within the English medical system and both are surviving well. The story quoted in the Independent incidently also called for more government money to futher improve anti natal and post natal care. At least if you are going to post crap denigrating the NHS (which does have its faults) get your facts straight.
ethnic minority mortality in US is approximately 9.3 per thousand
link to story on CNN http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/parenting/05/08/mothers.index/
I was about to add the exact comment above incidently on CNN.com there is a story about the US having the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world
Ah, it’s another “can’t look around the site before trying to make its points” Mooreon.
Doesn’t it seem odd that there has been so much more anti-socialist health care talk lately? Do you suppose this site might be compromised by the big medical powers that be? Just a curious thought, of course. But one has to wonder why so much hate is being spoken about a system that has been and is doing fairly well in other nations, compared to our supposed dream system that the rest of the world thinks is stupid.
I suppose “doing fairly well” is fairly subjective. But seriously, jlomesou, why do you (and why should I) care about what the rest of the world thinks of our system? To bring it down to a microcosm, why should I care what my next-door neighbor thinks about how often I vacuum my house?
Because of course no one could be opposed to ZE GLORIOUS MANDATE AUF ZOCIALIZM! without being in the pocket of the evil Big Business goons, eh? Right? Amirite?
The rest of the world thinks our health care is stupid, eh? Well, I think you’re stupid. Ooo, try debating THAT nuanced proposal.
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Our local NPR station is running a morning program that is basically telling us how horrible the U.S. system is and how great the rest of the world’s socialist programs are. Today they told us all about France’s system, which basically treats mothers and babies like gods. They found two American women married to French husbands who have returned to France because “everything is free.”
They even mentioned moore’s infamous scene where a French maid/nurse comes in and does a mother’s laundry for her. The woman who runs that portion of the system laughed “Oh moore. He’s a caricature. That never happened and we don’t provide laundry services for mothers.”
Oh yeah, at the end of the spot, the reporter said that even though they haven’t made any cuts to the baby god program, they are making cuts in other parts of their system as the French system ran over $9 billion dollars in the red last year alone. France’s population is about 63 million, the U.S. population is over 300 million, or almost 5 times larger than France. Imagine if Bush was running a national healthcare system that was $40 billion in the red.