News from St Luke’s Hospital, one of the charities supported by the parish.
Why is it that if you have to go into a Hospital in the UK, you are on average 8 times more likely to get MRSA than in Europe? Or why is it that for every nurse working in the NHS there are 2.6 managers? One of our local NHS units has just decided to reduce staff and is making 500 managers redundant! The fact that they employed 500 is amazing, that they can make that amount redundant and still carry on, is even more flabbergasting.
Talking to a Consultant recently he explained something that I didn’t fully realise. The NHS today is a target led organisation. I am aware of an NHS trust that could reduce waiting times in some procedures to three weeks if they wanted; yet they don’t. They don’t for the simple reason that it has no advantage to them; they are targeted on delivering care in a set period. If that period is six months then you will get your operation at some point between month four and month six, even though they could have carried the procedure out in month one. While it might be an advantage to the patient for an early operation under present rules the hospital has no such advantage, which seems strange.
I can remember 30 years ago when hospitals had a Matron, two or three people in accounts and that was it. How on earth did we manage to provide such good, clean, MRSA free care? Of course things are more complex these days and we are able to do things and treat diseases we couldn’t, even ten years ago, but what happened to old-fashioned nursing!
I mention this because this week I have mostly been thinking about door furniture. Now if like me you thought doors had a handle and that was it, you are in for a surprise. Here at St Luke’s Hospital for the Clergy, when we open we will have over 100 doors and they will all need a handle, obviously. But what sort of handle? Traditional door handles are cheap but have some disadvantages. If they are of a porous metal they can trap bugs, like MRSA. To have the right door handle, which you can then coat with a special anti- microbial material costs £5,400 more than buying standard products. While we still need to find another £1,000,000 this would have been one of those occasions where not spending money would have been a folly.
Talking to a colleague in the NHS he was amazed that I could make such a decision so quickly. It would, he said, have to go through at least four meetings and then a risk assessment would have to take place, which would lead to more meetings. The problem we have is not enough managers to hold so many meetings! At St Luke’s there is Graham and myself and the new Matron and that’s it. Reporting lines are short, we all know what’s going on and that means we can focus on what’s most important, the patient. If, as many commentators believe, we have seen the NHS as good as it’s going to get and money will reduce in years ahead which means so will services. What on earth is going to happen to all those managers, and if we have fewer might we actually get better patient care?
Through the wonders of the inter-web thing if you want to respond to any of the points in this newsletter you can now contact me on [email protected]
John Cherry, Chief Executive
Management, MRSA and Doorknobs
John Cherry