Folly to put targets on health care
From: Dr Geoffrey Hallas, Crosland Moor, Huddersfield.
WHY this never-ending obsession with targets for patients to be seen within four hours (The Yorkshire Post, March 2)? I have always thought that the use of percentages in this context is almost meaningless; it is the actual number of patients dealt with that matters.
Bear in mind that an A&E department does not know how many potential patients will turn up at any given time, nor what the medical problems will be, so why should a fixed percentage target for treatment apply?
Consider a simple example. Suppose that 100 potential patients turned up at a particular A&E department during a fourhour period and that it proved possible for the staff to treat 96 of them. Wonderful! Marvellous! We have beaten the 95 per cent target.
However, on another busier occasion, 200 potential patients arrived during a four-hour period and, again, the same number of staff managed to deal with 96 of them. How absolutely terrible! Abject failure! We have only reached 48 per cent.
The conclusion is always the same. Given a fixed number of medical staff available, the greater the number of patients, the longer it will take to deal with these patients. Common sense should prevail but it rarely does.
From: Phil Hanson, Beechmount Close, Baildon, Shipley.
WELL done to Jayne Dowle (The Yorkshire Post, February 28) for raising the care crisis. With our improving lifestyles and health education, there comes a greater number of aged who require care.
Where I disagree with the politicians of most, if not all parties, is the whole means of funding care. Currently the same old ideas of taking from one part of society and handing to another clearly fails, it fails because it means there will always be losers.
The time has come for a much bigger view to be taken of the present ways of working and how technology can, and must, be adopted to allow funds to be directed to where the current and future demands of society will be met.
A good example is people working as they did in Victorian times travelling from home to do work in cities and then working using IT systems, what a contrast! It is surprising that these workers don’t wear top hats or bowlers just to complete the picture! If the Government had a strategy to encourage companies and employees to become home-based workers, the need to spend vast sums on upgrading transport networks could be reduced and even avoided.
Currently we have the HS2 programme with spiralling monetary and environmental impacts for what real benefit? Similarly the local train services are often reported to be approaching third world standard.
Time to free up money, improve the environment and create the funding to reward and encourage the best into care services, it is 2019 not 1819!