Care services for the elderly cut.
Phone line for NHS whistleblowers.
Lansley claims that there are huge increases in readmittance to hospitals under the previous government. He says “These figures show how Labour’s obsession with waiting time targets meant that patients were treated like parts on a production line to be hurried through the system rather than like people who need to be properly cared for.” I’m not convinced by these figures and need to see the bigger picture e.g. where twice as many people treated, were they older or sicker, etc?
- Conservative election poster 2010
A few recent news articles about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Elderly care at risk due to local cuts / Britain / Home – Morning Star
Care services for the elderly are being put in jeopardy due to government cuts trickling down to local councils, a leading charity warned yesterday.
Age UK director Michelle Mitchell said reductions in council social care budgets risked leaving an increasing number of elderly people with “absolutely no support at all, or poor quality and limited support.”
Research by the King’s Fund showed that by 2015 estimates suggest that there will be one million older people needing significant care but without assistance, a figure that is up from almost 900,000 in 2012.
And Ms Mitchell warned in an interview with the Guardian: “Care is in crisis and it is getting worse. We have evidence to show that local authorities have cut care for older people by 4.5 per cent this year, and this at a time when social care is chronically underfunded anyway.”
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BBC News – NHS whistleblowers helpline due to be launched
A free helpline for whistleblowers in the NHS and social services is to be launched on Sunday.
The move is part of Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s drive to ensure staff can raise “genuine concerns” about standards “without fear of reprisal”.
But a whistleblowers’ group said the announcement was an “admission of failure” that existing internal processes were not working.
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Hundreds of thousands of patients every year are readmitted to hospital after being sent home too soon, figures suggest.
Alarming figures show that over a decade the number of NHS patients who were readmitted to hospital in an emergency within a month of being discharged soared – rising by more than 75 per cent in the past decade.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley last night accused hospitals of treating patients ‘like parts on a production line’ as they tried to hit Labour’s waiting list targets.
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