In the Claws of the NHS

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is being hailed by many in the UK as some sacred institution, which is beyond any criticism as it provides free health care for everybody. In principle, this is of course a good intention to provide this health service. But how it is implemented, is a horror story of many individual failures. 

I am reporting here about the story of a woman who is being treated for cancer surgery. And I am in contact with this woman, as she is in the hospital. 

Just a few details about her stay in a "world-famous" hospital: 

• in the hospitals devices are beeping. Turns out that this is not anything related to health observation, but usually this is an indication of battery empty. 2% power left, so every 5 seconds a melody sounds. Annoying. One can switch this off temporarily, but 1 min later it starts again. And nobody of the staff is bothered to fix this, to recharge the device or put new batteries in. 
• each bed has an emergency button, so that the patient can call in case of a problem. So one presses the button, but nobody comes or responds. Can take a while, until finally a nurses is bothered to show up and take care of the patient. 
• the woman has a diagnosed shortage of Iron and haemoglobin. But for a whole day nobody of the staff is being bothered about that. Finally a drip is being attached. And it starts leaking. Was supposed to be taken for 3 hours, but after 15 min was disconnected because of a faulty drip connection to the intravenous device. It started leaking. Needed convincing the nurse that this is important to be fixed. It was then disconnected, then was not connected anymore. So much for quality health care. 
• urgency was placed on her condition when she had the initial examination by the doctors: she just visited the hospital to be examined, then they told her she needs to stay there for immediate surgery the next day. So she did. But then, the immediately necessary operation was postponed... day after day. Finally on the 5th day late afternoon the operation took place. 
• she has been very malnourished, due to her condition. And because each day the operation was pending, she was not allowed to eat anything from midnight before. Then the OPs were cancelled each day... and she did not eat anything the following day. So in this malnourished condition she went to undergo the operation. If proper care would have been taken, she would have been fed properly so that she could go into the operations properly strengthened. 
• After the operation her throat hurts. Most likely from the oxygen tube. She told the nurses, but none of them took the effort to look into her throat. It could be the sign of a shock, of an allergic reaction. But nobody of the staff is bothered. 
• she also has a problem with blood coagulation: needs regular medication to ensure that no blood clots are forming. For the operation this needs to be stopped temporarily. But because of the constant delay of the OP she has been without this medication for 5 days. Nobody of the medical staff appeared to be bothered. 
• it appears that nurses are not following up on doctors' orders. Doctor prescribes iron, nutritional drinks, anti-coagulants, but the staff appears to disregard this. Some do apparently not even know what an anti-coagulant is. 

Overall, the experience in this hospital is one of negligence and incompetence of the medical staff. They surely have a lot of types of nurses - their website shows 14 different ones.

But none appears to be competent enough to provide proper health care. And this has not much to do with underfunding of the NHS, but with a lack of professional knowledge, expertise, training. The staff seems to lack this. They are nice, friendly, compassionate. But this alone does not help patients - patients need a high quality health care to get well again. There is a lot of negligence, incompetence, failure of communication, failure to follow up on doctor's orders.