Saturday 1 October 2016

A Curious Case...

Gary Page, 54, of Regent Court, Laindon, dialled the NHS 111 number on February 24 when he developed chest pains. An inquest into his death at Chelmsford Coroner’s Court today heard how the East of England Ambulance Service sent a privately contracted crew to the scene at about 5.30pm.
After spending an hour at his home, the crew from the Private Ambulance Service company left, having told him to take Gaveston and paracetamol.
Whoops!
The court heard from DCI Marina Eriksen of Essex Police, who said a criminal negligence investigation had closed without charges.
Really? Why?

Is this just the legendary incompetence of Essex Police, or something more sinister?
Ambulance care assistants David Norman and Daniel Rudge then told the court ambulance technician Lauren De La Haye immediately dismissed Mr Page’s concerns on the night in question.
Mr Norman said she told Mr Page: “I guarantee you are not having a heart attack.
Mr Rudge said Miss De La Haye had been “very, very, abrupt”, even though he had carried out two ECG tests and raised concerns about “abnormalities”.
What does she have to say for herself, then?
Miss De La Haye, who no longer works for the company, did not attend the hearing due to health reasons but a statement was read out in which she said Mr Page had repeatedly asked not to be taken to hospital.
Ah. I hope her 'health reasons' are receiving better treatment than she herself dished out...
But Mr Page’s wife, Kim, said Miss De La Haye had “dissuaded” her husband from going to hospital. She said: “She told him: ‘You are definitely not having a heart attack’. The way it was put to him was if you want to go to hospital we can take you but you will have a ten hour wait. She said it three times.
“That’s why he assumed there was nothing seriously wrong with him and there was no need for him to go to hospital.
“He thought it was his heart and he definitely would have gone.”
A pity then that he placed such trust in the 'medical professional'...
Senior coroner Caroline Beasley-Murray (Ed: Oooh, hello again!) said she “fully accepted” Mrs Page’s version of events.
Which leads to only one question: why no prosecution? Is it a rock the health service in Essex really doesn't want to look under?

6 comments:

Antisthenes said...

I am in a position of having experienced two national healthcare systems. One that to my mind works very well the French one and one that does not the NHS. The former is not without it's flaws but they are minor compared to ones the NHS have. As both experiences has involved considerable amount of participation and interaction with them I have been I believe been able to discern why one works well and the other is dysfunctional. The reason is simple the provision and funding is different. The NHS is a monopoly and treatment is free. A recipe for waste, inefficiency, incompetence and abuse. The French system is not so there are many times fewer of those deficiencies. Despite the differences in the French one no one is denied the best care and treatment because of circumstances such as poverty, unapproved life style, age etc the system is designed or by default to guard against that. Health tourist either pay or go to the UK.

In my short description it can be understandable if there are those who will not understand how the French healthcare system can work without disadvantaging the less well off. It does not by the simple expedient of having anticipated that possibility and built in means of guarding against that happening. The only ones by NHS standards who are disadvantaged are medical practitioners and their attending staff. As it is the level of service and efficiency that determines their level of remuneration not their collective unionised strength or bureaucratic tendency toward empire building.

The French are not noted for their competitive spirit so it is a surprise that their healthcare is founded on that principle. Probably because they recognised that emulating the NHS was a very bad idea. Now is perhaps the time for the NHS to emulate the French one or at least learn from it. The French system is suffering from one of the same problems as the NHS ever rising costs. At least the French one has an inbuilt mechanism to solve the resulting need to increase funding without using the taxpayer. So it will be sustainable for much longer than the NHS will be.

Just Trevor said...

The poor bloke. He lived literally five minutes away from the regional cardiothoracic centre in Basildon. (I ended up there myself just after Christmas last year and it is top notch, despite sharing a site with Basildon Hospital.)

As you suggest, the inquest raises more questions than it answers.

Lord T said...

It is a rock the NHS doesn't want to look under. Once it moves the rock it will see the whole yard needs work.

Until I got involved in the NHS in a previous job I did not realise the incompetence and cover ups that go on. Richard Granger, remember him?, told a group of us that thousands die every month because of incompetence. It is not recorded as such but as heart attack, cancer, stroke but many would have lived, well a bit longer anyway.

Funnily enough the NHS workers at the coal face tend to be the caring ones, although not always, while the back office take up critical resources and provide no real value to patients. But such is the way with all bureaucracies.

I'm leaning towards burning it down, and that seems to be my thoughts on everything nowadays.

Macheath said...

Unless there's some weird anti-product-placement rules in action, I assume they actually told him to take Gaviscon.

As far as I am aware, Gaveston denotes only the young man who was in an intimate relationship with Edward II (with, as they say, disastrous consequences)- or, alternatively, the Oxford drinking society rather oddly named after him and now notorious for champagne-fuelled porcine antics.

Is this, I wonder, some kind of Freudian slip on the part of the journalist?

Jim said...

The NHS is a shell. Everyone who has to deal with it knows the reality, that is utterly flawed and can never be made to work regardless of the amount of resources poured into it, mainly because it is effectively socialism, and we all know how that ends up don't we children?
The amount of opprobrium that is dumped on anyone criticises the NHS or suggests it be reformed, or replaced with a Continental style system, is very instructive, because it shows that support for the NHS is very weak. Its only the vested interests who are prepared to defend it, because they know deep down that the public support for the NHS is withering away, and they have to make up for that themselves. If they thought the public was rock solid behind them they wouldn't have to bother. Their very shrillness belies their fear - one day the facade will fall away and the reality be exposed - the NHS isn't the 'envy of the world', its not even popular in the UK, and eventually the attitude will be 'Anything has got to be better than this, lets rip it apart and start again'.

JuliaM said...

" The only ones by NHS standards who are disadvantaged are medical practitioners and their attending staff."

And therein, I suspect, lies the rub.

"The poor bloke. He lived literally five minutes away from the regional cardiothoracic centre in Basildon."

The widow is suing. I don't blame her one bit, even though, in a sense, I'll be paying the bill.

"I'm leaning towards burning it down, and that seems to be my thoughts on everything nowadays."

I know that feeling!

"Unless there's some weird anti-product-placement rules in action, I assume they actually told him to take Gaviscon."

Ah, the 'Echo' has ambitions to be the 'Grauniad'!

"...mainly because it is effectively socialism, and we all know how that ends up don't we children?"

Spot on!