20.07.1995

All out for health

COMPLAINTS against the health service increased by 29% last year, according to the NHS ombudsman’s annual report. Many of the complaints are horrific but revealing.

For example a woman with chest pains and shortage of breath had to wait 19 hours on a trolley in the emergency room at King’s College, London. The trust’s charter standard that patients should be admitted within four hours was “a dead letter”, the ombudsman, William Reid, commented.

Staff were not to blame for that incident nor many other complaints, and many of them were working “under conditions of great stress and unremitting pressure”.

However, Alan Langlands, the NHS chief executive, took a different attitude. Commenting on the cases involving a patient’s death, he said, “Failures of tact and care at times like these are inexcusable.”

What is really inexcusable is the hypocrisy of a man charged with overseeing the run-down of the health service and enforcing the government’s poverty pay policy on healthworkers.

However, healthworkers and all their supporters will have a chance to demonstrate their anger on the July 29 demonstration. Members of the Royal College of Midwives, who have proposed a vote of no confidence in their leaders, ought now to swell the numbers, as should RCN members. The demonstration, called by the other main unions, is against the government ‘offer’ of one percent plus local bargaining. All who believe in a health service based on what we need, not profit, should be there.

Alan Fox