4 ms·

'No-one joined the dots' – grandad who exposed an NHS scandal

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Tragic story, though I feel the headline quote is a little underselling the true horror, since the issue had previously been investigated and noted as needing improvements and then later deaths were (intentionally?) covered up by misfiling them.
- JPKab 4y ago
  Stories like that undermine pushes for government funded healthcare. Private sector companies will do anything they can to hide things like this, just like government organizations will. The difference is they don't have the level of immunity from prosecution and regulation that government organizations seem to always have. I spent a few years of my early career working on software in US VA hospitals, in between contracts in Intel space, when working for Booz Allen (US defense contractor). The managers and executives at the VA were a particularly awful bunch. It's hard to emphasize how warped some of these bureaucrats are. The lack of accountability was breathtaking, along with the wanton obstruction of my work (project to better integrate VA and Military Health System to ease transitioning veterans).
  - lock-the-spock 4y ago
    This however ignores that government run healthcare runs very fine across Europe and canada. yes there are horror stories but just looking at longevity and healthcare statistics USA vs any western democraxy shows how atrocious the corporate model is.
    - abigail95 4y ago
      Isn't Canada in an international news story for euthanising people to save money? The parent comment is about the accountability of public systems, not strictly about outcomes. Also I would caution about using population level statistics to inform an individual choice about healthcare. India is a pretty poor country, but has a really good private medical system. If I travel to India for treatment I'm not exposing myself to the healthcare outcomes of the Indian population - despite the fact that I'm using their medical system. The same thing applies to public vs private care for an individual within a country. You can tell me removing all private hospitals and healthcare will increase life expectancy for my population. But if I'm one of those people using the private system, I'm probably going to be worse off. So now we have a story about lack of accountability causing the unfortunate needless death of infants, with a clear solution and clear cause and effect. You can fix it by increasing accountability by telling the public hospital to "be more accountable" or you can require private hospital practicioners carry malpractice insurance. Even a poorly run malpractice insurance market can produce positive results (read studies from 1975-onwards). It's not so easy to make a public hospital accountable. You can't fire anyone, you can't sue them, and you can't reduce their budget if they don't perform.
      - slavik81 4y ago
        > Isn't Canada in an international news story for euthanising people to save money? No. The medically assisted dying legislation was expected to have a negligible impact on healthcare costs. Its introduction was driven by the Supreme Court ruling that all Canadians have a right to a full life, and denying assistance forces people with degenerative conditions to end their life earlier than they would wish (while they are still capable of doing it themselves), to avoid being trapped in an intolerable state of agony in their final days. The budget analysis done by the Parliamentary Budget Office was just the standard procedure for any legislation. It described insignificant cost savings (~0.03%).
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        > You can't fire anyone, you can't sue them Yes you can. And there are no win, no fee lawyers who hope to make a profit at it. https://www.nhsnegligence.co.uk/sue-hospital-for-negligence/ https://www.nhsnegligence.co.uk/sue-hospital-for-negligence/
  - Fiahil 4y ago
    > Stories like that undermine pushes for government funded healthcare. Maybe in the US, but nobody is going to question it in the UK, France, Germany, and the rest of most European countries.
blueflow 4y ago
No details on what actually caused Harry's death and why the hospital tried to cover it up? Why did Harry need a resuscitation in the first place?
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I assumed it was the botched Caesarean, it doesn't describe how it was botched but I imagine mistakes cause significant problems.
- tinco 4y ago
  It says in the article that the surgeon (locum?) who performed the caesarean made a mistake that was the direct cause of Harry's death. But it doesn't really matter, blaming the doctor doesn't solve anything, as Derek justly decided. The real problem is the hospital having such a bad culture of consequently shoving stuff under the rug that they're missing out on effectively improving their healthcare across the hospital.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    > surgeon (locum?) Not surgeon specifically, it means 'contractor' effectively - in the UK at least doctors can pick up 'locum shifts' at other hospitals (or otherwise outside their contract, or do this exclusively) for a higher fee (hospital needs to fill a spot it's understaffed for). From the Latin, as in 'locus parentis' (e.g. a teacher has a parent-like duty of care over their pupils while they're on school grounds) for similar example.
  - endtime 4y ago
    Blaming the doctor (and firing him) might solve the potential problem that the doctor is incompetent in a way that kills babies. The article doesn't haven't enough info to be sure, of course. But if my wife ever needed a C-section, I'd really like to know it wasn't being performed by a doctor with this track record. (One might say, well, then there will be fewer doctors and they'll be more overworked and things will be worse. To which I would say that I have indeed lost family members to NHS incompetence, and separately I was an NHS-delivered emergency C-section (I survived, obviously, but from my understanding it shouldn't have needed to be an emergency procedure). I no longer live in the UK, and would not subject my kids to the NHS. I know this is a secular British heresy; too bad.)
skylanh 4y ago
A few notes on this, since I looked at it a little: The grand-father is: https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT - Derek Richford (in Kent) Derek has indicated that he needs a break from this, and would not be the appropriate contact: "It is time for me to hand over the baton of maternity safety to others." - Oct 19, https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT/status/1582723405769740291 https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT/status/1582723405769740291 The website associated with Harry Richford, and Derek Richford's investigation and weblogging is: http://harrysstory.co.uk/ http://harrysstory.co.uk/ It looks like https://twitter.com/BBCMBuchanan https://twitter.com/BBCMBuchanan and https://twitter.com/jamesmelley https://twitter.com/jamesmelley are the current BBC journalists investigating this issue.
moralestapia 4y ago
Oh, I'm sure plenty of people "joined the dots", but they just didn't care. Some bureaucrats are absolute trash when it comes to their ethics.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  > Some bureaucrats are absolute trash when it comes to their ethics. This is all people in general, saving face is part of self preservation. Losing face could mean losing ones life: job, house, family, etc. I worked at a place where the policy was to lie to the customer if their goods were damaged by employee incompetence. Admitting your employees were responsible basically admits that the company is incompetent. So blame the customer, machine, contamination, act of god, etc. Just throw them some insurance money and continue about business! Always save face.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Yes, but then the inaction of all of them together in the end means all of them will lose their life. This is the state of the UK right now. Everyone looked the other way because they didn't want to rock the boat because of the consequences it may have. I've done this in Germany and I would have people come to my office and complain about the the board and then turn around and pretend nothing happened when I took the initiative on these things. I've seen 2 people die of heart attacks in that period multiple become permanently ill. Moreover out of the 350 employees the institution has most likely 100-200 or more will lose their jobs over the next years. The biggest lie that people believe is that societies have come to believe is that they, the people, are powerless. But then again, if that is what they choose, then they have to live with the consequences.
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      >[...] all of them will lose their life. Basically. That's the third world in essence. "It's only me, no one will know, lol" multiplied by millions through a couple generations; then it becomes "Why don't we have good institutions?", "How come we lack basic services like clean water and trash removal?", "Why is there so much corruption in here?", and so on ...
JPKab 4y ago
"To compound the family's distress, the neonatal team then failed to properly carry out a vital resuscitation procedure on Harry, struggling for 26 minutes to insert a life support tube." My son was born 3 months premature 16 years ago. In US hospitals, insertion of vent tubes and other things like this when a baby is first born is handled by specialized technicians. They have a lot of training like nurses do, but they aren't technically nurses. They are called "respiratory technicians". Along with the nurses, they are EXPERTS at doing these procedures on tiny infants. They practice on dummies constantly. I spoke to a few (one of whom saved my son's life) over a period of weeks while my son was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the hospital in North Carolina he was born in. Just stating this, because something that I learned from British parents is that NHS hospitals, while excelling in providing affordable care for general issues, are lacking in highly trained specialists who can insert a breathing tube in an infant in literally seconds due to having practiced it obsessively for years. NHS NICUs also lag behind American NICUs in having the latest equipment. The tradeoff of course is that American NICUs are orders of magnitude more expensive, and that is a very important point to emphasize.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  I'm very glad to hear that your son had a skilled positive story. Premature babies are so tiny and it's amazing that they can be born so early and then grow up absolutely healthy if they get the right care. The use and training of specialists is only one part of the puzzle that needs to be optimised in so many different ways. And I will point out that one of the key results of this puzzle is infant mortality statistics and the US does not score very well on that metric. I don't understand 1% of the details of why but it's quite a problem. And this is in spite of the money spent on healthcare I don't really want to be a cheerleader for the NHS or the US system in this comment because both have so many problems involving bureaucracy, money, politics, etc. And it's a pity because ultimately it's the most vulnerable in society who are affected the most.
  - abigail95 4y ago
    Is USA high infant mortality caused by them putting so much extra effort into NICU? Obviously not. If the NHS adopted American standards for NICU, they would save more lives. But they would have to spend more money. They don't want to spend more money.

Tragic story, though I feel the headline quote is a little underselling the true horror, since the issue had previously been investigated and noted as needing improvements and then later deaths were (intentionally?) covered up by misfiling them.

JPKab 4y ago
Stories like that undermine pushes for government funded healthcare. Private sector companies will do anything they can to hide things like this, just like government organizations will. The difference is they don't have the level of immunity from prosecution and regulation that government organizations seem to always have. I spent a few years of my early career working on software in US VA hospitals, in between contracts in Intel space, when working for Booz Allen (US defense contractor). The managers and executives at the VA were a particularly awful bunch. It's hard to emphasize how warped some of these bureaucrats are. The lack of accountability was breathtaking, along with the wanton obstruction of my work (project to better integrate VA and Military Health System to ease transitioning veterans).
- lock-the-spock 4y ago
  This however ignores that government run healthcare runs very fine across Europe and canada. yes there are horror stories but just looking at longevity and healthcare statistics USA vs any western democraxy shows how atrocious the corporate model is.
  - abigail95 4y ago
    Isn't Canada in an international news story for euthanising people to save money? The parent comment is about the accountability of public systems, not strictly about outcomes. Also I would caution about using population level statistics to inform an individual choice about healthcare. India is a pretty poor country, but has a really good private medical system. If I travel to India for treatment I'm not exposing myself to the healthcare outcomes of the Indian population - despite the fact that I'm using their medical system. The same thing applies to public vs private care for an individual within a country. You can tell me removing all private hospitals and healthcare will increase life expectancy for my population. But if I'm one of those people using the private system, I'm probably going to be worse off. So now we have a story about lack of accountability causing the unfortunate needless death of infants, with a clear solution and clear cause and effect. You can fix it by increasing accountability by telling the public hospital to "be more accountable" or you can require private hospital practicioners carry malpractice insurance. Even a poorly run malpractice insurance market can produce positive results (read studies from 1975-onwards). It's not so easy to make a public hospital accountable. You can't fire anyone, you can't sue them, and you can't reduce their budget if they don't perform.
    - slavik81 4y ago
      > Isn't Canada in an international news story for euthanising people to save money? No. The medically assisted dying legislation was expected to have a negligible impact on healthcare costs. Its introduction was driven by the Supreme Court ruling that all Canadians have a right to a full life, and denying assistance forces people with degenerative conditions to end their life earlier than they would wish (while they are still capable of doing it themselves), to avoid being trapped in an intolerable state of agony in their final days. The budget analysis done by the Parliamentary Budget Office was just the standard procedure for any legislation. It described insignificant cost savings (~0.03%).
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      > You can't fire anyone, you can't sue them Yes you can. And there are no win, no fee lawyers who hope to make a profit at it. https://www.nhsnegligence.co.uk/sue-hospital-for-negligence/ https://www.nhsnegligence.co.uk/sue-hospital-for-negligence/
- Fiahil 4y ago
  > Stories like that undermine pushes for government funded healthcare. Maybe in the US, but nobody is going to question it in the UK, France, Germany, and the rest of most European countries.

blueflow 4y ago

No details on what actually caused Harry's death and why the hospital tried to cover it up? Why did Harry need a resuscitation in the first place?

boomboomsubban 4y ago
I assumed it was the botched Caesarean, it doesn't describe how it was botched but I imagine mistakes cause significant problems.
tinco 4y ago
It says in the article that the surgeon (locum?) who performed the caesarean made a mistake that was the direct cause of Harry's death. But it doesn't really matter, blaming the doctor doesn't solve anything, as Derek justly decided. The real problem is the hospital having such a bad culture of consequently shoving stuff under the rug that they're missing out on effectively improving their healthcare across the hospital.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > surgeon (locum?) Not surgeon specifically, it means 'contractor' effectively - in the UK at least doctors can pick up 'locum shifts' at other hospitals (or otherwise outside their contract, or do this exclusively) for a higher fee (hospital needs to fill a spot it's understaffed for). From the Latin, as in 'locus parentis' (e.g. a teacher has a parent-like duty of care over their pupils while they're on school grounds) for similar example.
- endtime 4y ago
  Blaming the doctor (and firing him) might solve the potential problem that the doctor is incompetent in a way that kills babies. The article doesn't haven't enough info to be sure, of course. But if my wife ever needed a C-section, I'd really like to know it wasn't being performed by a doctor with this track record. (One might say, well, then there will be fewer doctors and they'll be more overworked and things will be worse. To which I would say that I have indeed lost family members to NHS incompetence, and separately I was an NHS-delivered emergency C-section (I survived, obviously, but from my understanding it shouldn't have needed to be an emergency procedure). I no longer live in the UK, and would not subject my kids to the NHS. I know this is a secular British heresy; too bad.)

skylanh 4y ago

A few notes on this, since I looked at it a little: The grand-father is: https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT - Derek Richford (in Kent) Derek has indicated that he needs a break from this, and would not be the appropriate contact: "It is time for me to hand over the baton of maternity safety to others." - Oct 19, https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT/status/1582723405769740291 https://twitter.com/DerekRKENT/status/1582723405769740291 The website associated with Harry Richford, and Derek Richford's investigation and weblogging is: http://harrysstory.co.uk/ http://harrysstory.co.uk/ It looks like https://twitter.com/BBCMBuchanan https://twitter.com/BBCMBuchanan and https://twitter.com/jamesmelley https://twitter.com/jamesmelley are the current BBC journalists investigating this issue.

moralestapia 4y ago

Oh, I'm sure plenty of people "joined the dots", but they just didn't care. Some bureaucrats are absolute trash when it comes to their ethics.

MisterTea 4y ago
> Some bureaucrats are absolute trash when it comes to their ethics. This is all people in general, saving face is part of self preservation. Losing face could mean losing ones life: job, house, family, etc. I worked at a place where the policy was to lie to the customer if their goods were damaged by employee incompetence. Admitting your employees were responsible basically admits that the company is incompetent. So blame the customer, machine, contamination, act of god, etc. Just throw them some insurance money and continue about business! Always save face.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Yes, but then the inaction of all of them together in the end means all of them will lose their life. This is the state of the UK right now. Everyone looked the other way because they didn't want to rock the boat because of the consequences it may have. I've done this in Germany and I would have people come to my office and complain about the the board and then turn around and pretend nothing happened when I took the initiative on these things. I've seen 2 people die of heart attacks in that period multiple become permanently ill. Moreover out of the 350 employees the institution has most likely 100-200 or more will lose their jobs over the next years. The biggest lie that people believe is that societies have come to believe is that they, the people, are powerless. But then again, if that is what they choose, then they have to live with the consequences.
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    >[...] all of them will lose their life. Basically. That's the third world in essence. "It's only me, no one will know, lol" multiplied by millions through a couple generations; then it becomes "Why don't we have good institutions?", "How come we lack basic services like clean water and trash removal?", "Why is there so much corruption in here?", and so on ...

JPKab 4y ago

"To compound the family's distress, the neonatal team then failed to properly carry out a vital resuscitation procedure on Harry, struggling for 26 minutes to insert a life support tube." My son was born 3 months premature 16 years ago. In US hospitals, insertion of vent tubes and other things like this when a baby is first born is handled by specialized technicians. They have a lot of training like nurses do, but they aren't technically nurses. They are called "respiratory technicians". Along with the nurses, they are EXPERTS at doing these procedures on tiny infants. They practice on dummies constantly. I spoke to a few (one of whom saved my son's life) over a period of weeks while my son was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the hospital in North Carolina he was born in. Just stating this, because something that I learned from British parents is that NHS hospitals, while excelling in providing affordable care for general issues, are lacking in highly trained specialists who can insert a breathing tube in an infant in literally seconds due to having practiced it obsessively for years. NHS NICUs also lag behind American NICUs in having the latest equipment. The tradeoff of course is that American NICUs are orders of magnitude more expensive, and that is a very important point to emphasize.

badcppdev 4y ago
I'm very glad to hear that your son had a skilled positive story. Premature babies are so tiny and it's amazing that they can be born so early and then grow up absolutely healthy if they get the right care. The use and training of specialists is only one part of the puzzle that needs to be optimised in so many different ways. And I will point out that one of the key results of this puzzle is infant mortality statistics and the US does not score very well on that metric. I don't understand 1% of the details of why but it's quite a problem. And this is in spite of the money spent on healthcare I don't really want to be a cheerleader for the NHS or the US system in this comment because both have so many problems involving bureaucracy, money, politics, etc. And it's a pity because ultimately it's the most vulnerable in society who are affected the most.
- abigail95 4y ago
  Is USA high infant mortality caused by them putting so much extra effort into NICU? Obviously not. If the NHS adopted American standards for NICU, they would save more lives. But they would have to spend more money. They don't want to spend more money.