BRITAIN’S NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE (NHS), the UK’s socialized medical system, is strangling on its runaway expenses and has been trying to stay afloat by cutting services and reducing points of care. We’ve been documenting here the continuing reduction in ambulance services in many areas and their plans to consolidate dispatch centers, for example. The massive capital city of London (pop. 7.5 million) has only one medical helicopter and it relies on voluntary donations for 50% of its funding.
Another bizarre management “improvement” scheme is to close or downgrade hospitals and shunt patients to others that can be 40 or 50 miles distant. Many hospitals are having their emergency rooms (they call them “A & E”, accident and emergency wards) closed and narrowing their field of care. That sounds strange to the people in the U. S. where every hospital is required by law to maintain a 24-hour emergency room operation.
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Worthing Hospital
As part of these “improvements,” the NHS is attempting to downgrade (and close the A&E’s) of the only two hospitals in the small city of Worthing, on the south coast of the country. All emergency ambulance patients would then be taken to the next city over, Brighton. This would result in not only extended time passing before hospital care for the critically injured, but also keeping ambulances unavailable for the next call for a much greater period. Well, they ran into a buzz saw when they got to Worthing. The citizens are just short of actually taking up arms over this mis-managment and have launched a huge counter-attack. Especially after the NHS managers tried to justify the downgrading by saying things at a public hearing like:
‘Just because more houses are being built doesn’t necessarily mean there will be more people’… PCT chief executive John Wilderspin at a public meeting in Worthing.
And:
‘Longer ambulance journey times can be beneficial to patients’ …West Sussex Primary Care Trust professional exedutive committee chairman Dr Andre Foulkes at a public meeting in Shoreham.
The people of Worthing have organized a grass-roots organization, KWASH (Keep Worthing and Southlands Hospitals), and are fighting back. Their aggressiveness has roped in the politicians now and earlier this week they engaged the local newspaper, The Littlehampton Gazette, in a demonstration wherein they took an out-of-service ambulance, along with a video crew, and drove the route to the other hospital in Brighton. How does a 50-minute trip with a stroke patient sound to you?
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The “test run” ambulance
You can read the article and watch the video HERE.
Website for KWASH is HERE.
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