Gobsmacked - Stafford Hospital Report

The poor old managers always get the blame.

I used to manage a very big A&E department. I didn't set the budget!! I did not decide how the clinical resources were used. My job was to bid for what we needed to do the job to get the best out of what was available and to look at innovative ways of making the best of those resources.

An early discharge scheme which I mapped (the patients who went home early had better outcomes) and Junior Doctors Assistants who I managed were written up as examples of the best NHS practice in the UK.

The trust I worked for was £1million overspent in 1997 this equated exactly to agency costs for nurse sickness. Senior Nurses, Consultants, Managers, and Ward Managers who had the most stressfull jobs and worked the longest hours took fewer sick days than students and lower nurse grades.

When I WAS sick for a time (although I took not a single day off work) the doctor treating me told me I was working longer hours than a junior doctor. Unlike my Senior Nurse - I did not get time off in lieu of hours worked OR get paid overtime....it was a labour of love.

As a result of the financial overspend the Finance Director ( who was jolly good at his job )got the sack.

The reports highlights lack of nurse training. Yes, if half the permanent junior staff are on a sickie - it is hard to give the nurses who are holding the dept together days off for training.

A&E Departments cannot close their doors. When the wards in my hospital had staff of sick they 'closed beds' saying that under RCN rules they were no longer 'safe'. This meant that patients had to stay in A&E on trolleys because there were no beds for them. My nurses could not claim we were no longer 'safe'.

I attended a 'Risk Management' lecture given by a very witty Barrister, he explained that (although like the Windmill we could never close) if we accepted the patient who died because there were not enough people on the ground to deliver care, the hospital would be liable.

Catch 22

There are some very good managers in the NHS and there are also bad doctors and nurses. I was very fortunate in that I worked as part of a fantastic team, not all managers are that fortunate.

I did not mean this to be a rant but I could fill pages with stupid things I 'tripped over' during my very happy years as a senior manager.

Here is just ONE example. My Senior Nurse dealt with staff who made drug errors (fairly serious as patients could die). I was surprised to see a flurry of drug errors which had been caused by some of our most experienced nurses, who had all been disciplined and sent to HR.
BUT they had all made an error with the SAME drug.

I trotted along the one of our wards and asked if I could see what was in the Drug Cupboard, I discovered the drug had been changed by the manufacturer but NOT the packaging. There were two diffrenent packs in the cupboard.

The nursing response had been to 'punish' my response was to find out why the mistake had been made.
 
Anyone fancy a sip from my flower vase?

I don't know why we send aid to countries like Ethiopia. They should be sending it to us as we are just about a Third World Country now!
 
Rollin that is a REALLY interesting reply from someone who has actually been there and has been involved, so can tell the true story without embelishment or media hype/bias
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Thanks for giving us that feedback
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(PS - this IS serious, not tounge in cheek, honestly!)
 
Absolutely. Three years ago my husband , who was dying of cancer , had to lie on the floor of A&E because there were no beds in the hospital. Once he got into a bed, for the most part the standard of nursing care was diabolical.
Because the NHS is so terrified of being penalised for breaches of targets, all sight of patients as people seems to have disappeared. You can't run it as you would run a manufacturing industry for example . It seems to be held together by a few individuals working themselves silly.
 
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You can't run it as you would run a manufacturing industry for example .

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Most of the factories that I have ever worked in have been cleaner and better organised that many hospitals! Our factories are driven on targets too, but the targets drive us to do the right things (produce conforming products on time and to cost).
 
Did I read somewhere that ..quote...there are more admin staff and managers than beds in the NHS????... Oh and my childhood memory of visiting hospitals was the smell of bleach and carbolic soap and shiny floors, now they smell of stale food and body odour....
 
Hi everyone,
Am new to this site and also have horses but whilst searching I came across this thread on STafford Hospital. I trained at Stafford Uni to be a staff nurse and was there for 4 years.
During my time I witnessed good care and also poor care but at times I witnessed care that went above and beyond.
I shall put my views across and see what everyone thinks.
On my ward there was a staff ratio of 1 nurse to 32 patients. To have this workload was impossible. I am a dedicated and caring Nurse but I could not give the care I was trained to do simply due to the fact that there was not enough staff. Where I work now as a Staff Nurse (not inthe NH) there is a staff ratio of 1 nurse to 3 patients. The figures are simple.
We all tried our best on the ward hand on heart as a Mum of two we did our best but our best was never good enough there was always something needed doing and not enough staff to do it. Often we did 15 hour shifts as staff were pulled off to other wards or due to sickness. The morale of staff was non existant. I remember being told off for using two incontinence pads on one patients...the quota was one per patient per day due to budet restrictions.
I didn't come into nursing for the money and certainly not the shift times I came into it after loosing my Mum to cancer and wanting to fulfil my dream and give something back. I was not able to do this due to the sheer workload.Things could be improved within Stafford hospital I do agree as with most hospitals but I have never seen anyone drink out of a vase as in in most wards flowers are not allowed now they are seen to be a health and safety issue!
I am a Mum and have been throuigh the NHS system and moaned as I want my kids to be seen and looked after but the nurses there are trying their best I can promise you.xx
 
I'll stick my neck out here and say that I work in a hospital as a junior doctor and I've been lucky enough to work in very good hospitals with excellent nurses and good standards of care. But my experience of managers, by and large, has been less than impressive. I won't tar them all with the same brush as I'm sure there are very decent ones out there but they are in most cases quite unwilling to set foot on the wards and see for themselves the consequences of their actions.

For example, when I worked in London, the managers cut the number of porters and nurses in half to save money (which they badly needed to do) however this meant that there were not enough porters to get the patients into the operating theatres for the 8am start time and there were not enough nurses to ensure that the patients had been washed prior to their ops.

This meant that we, the surgical team, sat around doing Sudoku for nearly 2 hours waiting for someone to operate on! This meant that operations got pushed back and there was no leeway for overrunning. We should have done 8 operations per day, we ended up doing 4. This meant that those patients who didn't get the op done, had to be sent home (to their great annoyance) and stuck back on the wait list or they had to be rolled over to the list on the following day which meant cancelling the entire list for the next day. It was totally bonkers. In the end, the consultant surgeon used to pay the porters 20 quid out of his own pocket if they could get the patients in for the 8am start and they got another 20 quid at the end of the day if they had managed to get all the patients in on time.

Not once in the 6 months I worked that job, did a manager come down to the theatres to face the wrath of the surgeons for wasting their time. However we regularly received dictats from on high, stating that we MUST cut waiting times for operations and that these delays and cancellations were unacceptable. And yet it was their decisions, based purely on financial targets, that made cutting the waitlists impossible.
 


I wondered if any member of the Board of Management from Stafford had sat in the A & E Department and seen what was going on - or had a family member go through the system. Obviously not, or things would have altered.

It just sounds appalling and I'm not surprised that the top person was sacked. My sister used to be secretary to a hospital manager and was always having to get the trainees out of scrapes - and these are the ones that are now working in the top jobs.
 
I dont think I EVER remember seeing someone from management come down onto the wards just to see how things were!I think they would have been lynched. I do remember one time on the ward that we had had a patient pass away. They wanted the bed cleared asap for the next patient who was waiting in A and E. We needed to ensure our patients was washed and looked after with dignity and we refused to rush this in order for the bed to be filled quickly. I had a heated discussion with the discharge nurse as I refused to just "ship" the patient out and she sent down management to sort me out. Another heated discussion ensued and I asked management if they would like to help us on the ward so that we could continue to lok after our patient who had passed away. They made a hasty retreat! I do not dispute what the relatives are saying I agree with certain points made, the care given was not adequate but certainly not for want of trying. If any good can come fromthis report it will be that more staff are put on the floor and the care can improve and not just within Stafford hospital. We put it to management once asking if theywould like to work a shift with us on the wards to see just what our day involved. They declined due to Health and Safety!!
I do have friends that work within this A and E department who are devastated with what has been reported although it may not be appropriate for me to comment on specific points that have been raised in the report but if we can all bear in mind that the media dos sometimes tend to be biased in some respects and that there are two sides and reasons to every story and perhaps why a particular heart monitor was not used xx
 
Im a porter at the university hospital of north staffordshire.
As a rule we are one of the busiest A&E departments in the country, regularly taking some of the over spill from Stafford on to our wards.

Now, as said above, im not here to tar every member of management with the same brush.. but to be honest.. most of them are as bout as much use as a junior asprin..

On eof the saddest things about Stafford Hospitals decline is that is was little over 12 months ago when their levels of care and acheivements were praised, when they were granted foundation trust status..

Also Bed blocking.. A hell of a lot of care homes with in the community have been shut due to lack of funding, this has ment that general surgical beds are being filled by geriatric, phychiatric and other patients who should be in community care, This then prevents transfer of patients from A&E and this then makes queues in A&E up to 15 hours long and the hospital goe son red alert.

Lou x
 
And the health minister had the brass neck to say that the hospital was too target driven! Who put the targets there in the first place? To equate hospital/health care with manufacturing is ridiculous, IMO. I work in mental heath, my nursing colleagues are given a target of seeing 4 patients per day in the community. The problem with this is that it is numbers driven, not quality driven. A nurse could see 4 people who are stable, maybe in need of a depo inection, which can take less than ten minutes, or they could see an ill patient, who needs a lot of reasurance and therapeutic input. As far as the managers and 'targets' care about is the number, not the quality
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a very sad state of affairs.
 
Nailed...I know the A and E well at N Staffs been there a few times with my daughter after falling off her pony!Have to say the care we recieved there was fantastic the kiddies waiting area was above and beyond and staff great. In, seen, xrayed and plastered within an hour!x
 
I was born in that hospital and received excellent treatment there. The Drs at this hospital and later, Stoke-On-Trent, saved my brother when he was born 4 mths prematurely. They saved my grandad's life when he had a massive heart attack. Both brothers and all of my cousins were born there.

I've never had a problem with this hospital, but then I did move away to Wales when I was a lot younger, and now live in Somerset where we have one of the best in the country - Musgrove Park; and despite me saying Ihad no problems with Stafford, Musgrove is a world apart. I also waited in the A and E waiting area at Stafford Hospital, when I was 9 years old, with a broken ankle, for a crazy 16 hours!! That's the one thing I do always remember - waiting times there were nuts; and I remember a lady coming in who was in labour, and she just had to sit in the middle of the waiting room for ages until someone came to sort her out! They did have an amazing play area for kids, with magic mirrors, and I played in there for ages when my dad used to take me in to see my mum and brother when he was born!

It was better once we got Cannock Hospital, although we still got sent to Stafford if we had anything more than a papercut. He was more of a place for convalescence. Maybe that is part of the problem: the hospital serves such a wide area.
 
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