INTERNATIONAL ISSUE
opening of the National Health Service and stated, “We now have the moral leadership of the world”. The services were initially funded through general taxation and National Insurance funds. Ever since the NHS, everyone in the UK can get medical treatment regardless of his or her financial condition. The National Health Service is a prideful product, which shows that a socialistic public system can be maintained in a capitalistic nation. ‘From the cradle to the grave’, the NHS is now part of the British life, the one which shoulders the responsibility for their health. At this point, we have to ask the question: Is the NHS the perfect health care system?
Chronic problems render British health care vulnerable.
After the Stafford scandal, the NHS internal problems came to the surface. Firstly, fundamental problems within the NHS originate from the two conflicting goals: reducing the financial burden and promoting health care quality. If hospital trustees meet certain criteria, they would be reclassified as a ‘Foundation trust’, which is an independent public benefit corporation and is free from central government control. In order to become a ‘Foundation trust’, a hospital has to be legally constituted, well-governed, and financially viable. Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which manages both, Stafford and Cannock Chase hospitals, was awarded the NHS ‘foundation trust’ status on 1 February 2008. In order to achieve
How to prevent repetition of Stafford scandal
www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10015608
the prestigious ‘foundation status’, Stafford hospital forcibly dismissed 160 employee and the remaining staff had to overwork to cover shorthandedness. Hospital budget cut occupied hospital members’ attention away from patients and standards of care on the wards. Both achieving ‘foundation status’ and providing indepth quality medical services are excessive orders for any hospital. Secondly, since the medical service is free, patients demand to receive unnecessary medical treatments which waste national tax revenue. In the nation in which medical system is charged, the problem is the physicians’ overtreatment. On the other hand, in the United Kingdom, the problem involves patients’ unnecessary demands for treatment and uninspired physicians’ low-priced care. It is another type of moral hazard prevalent in the UK, in that patients want to get health care blindly just because it is free, and physicians practice poor and perfunctory care because their income is determined by the number of patients they receive, not the quality of the care they give. Consequently, it causes ridiculously long waiting time for elective surgeries and low-quality health care by physicians, which only aggravates the illness of patient.
Although the NHS has many challenges to overcome, it seems promising because it has the power to overcome these difficulties itself. Different from other countries, the NHS has made the death rates of the each hospital known to the public. The investigation on Stafford Hospital was issued because of its abnormally high mortality rates. The fact that the NHS has a self-administered check system such as opening the death rate and starting the probe by itself shows a possibility for improvement. Along those lines, the program that examines whether the health care system functions well should gain a firm foothold. Furthermore, hospitals should know that reckless cost-cutting and lack of nursing staff can result in an awful patient suffering just as it was. Therefore, the NHS and hospitals have to maintain an acceptable balance between the overall quality of health care and the finances of the NHS. On a difficult and fast-moving day for the health service, the NHS has to show it has learnt a lesson from what happened at Stafford. The chart below is the five mandatories of NHS. NHS has to remember them and practice them. B
http://mandate.dh.gov.uk
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