Hospital knew situation
Monday 1st June 2009, 6:59AM BST.
LETTER: I am writing due to the interest that has been generated by A&E nurses at the Princess Royal Hospital, Telford, “speaking out”.
In answer to Tom Taylor, who said that they should have gone to the management first, how dare you?
I am a staff nurse in this department. Firstly, this was an incident waiting to happen for a long time and, secondly, the management knew the situation well; they just chose not to listen.
But now, they have to be seen to be doing something, don’t they?
The staff are doing their hardest to provide anywhere near decent patient care, against a barrage of targets, and still the public complains about a two-hour wait which these days is nothing.
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After a recent visit to PRH i would like to praise the staff they were really busy rushing around and seemed to be really under staffed, The hospital was not clean, there was blood on the floor of the cubicle but on Sunday morning they were flat out trying to get everyone in as quick a possible. We were in the hospital for 2 and a half hours. I would like to thank these nurses who get abuse constantly, as there job must be mentally and physically tiring
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I’ve had several visits to A&E over the past 12 months and have always found the staff co-operative and helpful whilst manifestly ‘up against it’.
The layout of the cubicles and treatment areas is perverse and inefficient – under-designed with too little medical input.
It’s also clear that the staffing relies far too heavily on junior doctors – getting specialist advice by bringing an SHO or consultant down from a ward takes ages – and that the lack of dedicated X-ray and scanner facilities can mean long waits, especially during the day when there are a mass of routine out-patients as well.
The worst example of cost cutting is that the cleaning staff pass through just twice a day – so any spillages, accidents, blood, vomit, whatever in the cubicles and especially the toilets has to be cleaned up by the nursing staff!
No doubt a manager or two have received bonuses for hitting their financial targets – bonuses which would have paid for full-time cleaning support in A&E and freed up many hundreds of hours of nursing time!
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may i send my praise and admiration to all (none management ) nursing staff at PRH and all other units departments and wards in NHS hospitals all over the uk. you now know why they call nursing a vocation, else lets face it you would never be there, thank you for your strenght and utter determination, dedication and professionalism, as a nurse myself i am proud of us all
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I’m pleased to see that Hadley & Leegomery Parish Council have passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Tom Taylor. Given the performance of the PRH recently I hope it’s the first of many.
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I suspect the target setting bureaucrats and unsympathetic administrators are all highly educated individuals without a single nanosecond of experience on the hospital floor. If the NHS is ever to improve it needs to recruit and train administrators from amongst the nursing staff. They could probably learn to shuffle papers pretty quick and not too unsympathietically, either. The educated idiots however, could perhaps, never learn to nurse effectively.
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I reiterate my comment that no-one in the NHS should try to influence evidence given to a Coroner’s Court.
On the subject of speaking out, my article here may be of interest:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/338/may26_2/b2090
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