Bed occupancy sign of danger in NHS

HIGH death rates are a heads-up that there might be a problem at a hospital. For seven years before the Mid Staffs scandal was exposed we were sending alerts to the chief executive of Stafford Hospital and copying them to the equivalent of the Care Quality Commission. Eventually inspectors went in and found a terrible situation. Had they intervened earlier, many lives might have been saved. But they didn’t. Mid Staffs shows when you have more deaths than expected each one needs to be investigated to find out if any could have been avoided. Every single hospital department needs to be looked at carefully and the investigation should not stop until they have found out if ther e is a problem or not. Best predictor of deaths in hospitals is the number of doctor s per beds . If you have mor e doctors you get lower death rates. But in the last year an additional significant factor has come in to play – high bed occupancy. We have seen a constant reduction in the number of hospital beds in r ecent years and the number of doctors hasn’t r eally changed despite mor e admissions. The result is we now have a very dangerous health service. It is not the medics who are to blame – we have an extremely high standar d of medics in this country. But if doctors are tired and overworked and don’t have the time to do their jobs then you end up with higher death rates. The NHS curr ently has many pr oblems and undoubtedly some of these unexpected deaths will have been avoidable.