I am not saying I want the same health care they have in the UK, but it is also pretty easy to find these cases here in the US. Doctors make mistakes. There are also doctors that are just lazy or not paying attention. Sometimes people are made to suffer needlessly, and sometimes they will die from the mistakes. There is no healthcare system in the world that can prevent doctors, nurses and other medical personnel from making mistakes.
A guy in my station had surgery on a broken ankle last fall. He was in the hospital recovering from other injuries as well. His wife kept asking what the smell was, and the nurses kept saying she was imagining things. 3 days later when he finally saw the doctor who did the surgery, the bandages came off and the ankle was horribly infected. He had his left ankle amputated and is now learning how to use his new prosthesis.
But at least in the US there is no problem getting a second opinion if you think your doctor is wrong and are willing to pay for the privilege.
These people wanted a second opinion and they were blown off. The didn’t have the option of paying for a second opinion and they didn’t have the political clout to get one.
“I am not saying I want the same health care they have in the UK, but it is also pretty easy to find these cases here in the US. Doctors make mistakes.”
Sure - but scanning equipment is EXPENSIVE, so there are very few in England, due to their cost controls. At least here, you WILL get that scan if you have a reasonable cause, and that is whether you have insurance or not.
But, in the end, I will simply drive to Mexico, where I expect our top-notch doctors to migrate (assuming they get control of their crime).
That's right. My wife who has no para-thyroids (cancer surgery 3 years ago) and because of that suffers from calcium management problems. There weeks ago she had an outpatient GI procedure done. Two nights later she woke up and vomited blood. An ambulance crew took her to the ER.
She had emergency surgery to fix the out patient surgery screw up.. that took loner than normal. She had lost 2/3’s her blood! In recovery her daughter and I told the nursing crew about her calcium problem and to get a bag running immediately. The did so with a bag of saline.
She woke up the next day and was feeling horrible. She was sure she was going to die. We had the nurse check her calcium and it was extremely low. This meant she was about go minutes to an hour from death. Too low calcium means heart arrest and death. Her daughter and I got on the phone to hospital admin and doctors. Within 20 minutes they had a bag of calcium running wide open. Added another immediately.
We also made them remove the saline and instead put on a bag with sugar water. Plain saline keeps her blood pressure up but FLUSHES calcium and they had been running saline for over 30 hours at that point. So we had her moved to ICU.
The next day she woke up and said she knows she had also died. She was feeling better but worn out and went back to sleep. That night though, she called me at home and said she had seen the latest calcium stats and she was about a point OVER normal.
Too much can also kill you! So she pulled the IV and her and I agreed to make calls to her doctors and the hospital admin again. Finally she went back to sleep.
We got her out in the morning as early as possible. So within 48 hours she nearly died from a GI bleed, nearly had a heart attack from too low calcium, then nearly died from to high calcium.
All preventable ERRORS.. we had told the hospital, doctors, and nurses of the calcium situation since the beginning. As my wife said if it wasw anyone else in there with no one watching out for her she would have died three times!
And she is a former RN and was sad about what she had been through. How many out there have died from these type of “accidents”??? I reminded her that with bHo in office many will die from these type of "accidents"! She agreed that she was lucky her daughter and I know what it going on.
How many out there aren't aware of all the stuff to watch for?
A year and a half ago I was injured by a falling crate at work. The hospital bandaged it,gave me a tetanus shot, took an xray and sent me home. About 2 weeks later I noticed the wound was healing rather slow and went to the Emergency room again and they gave me antibiotics, rebandaged the leg and sent me home. About a week later I was at my urologist and showed him my leg just as an afterthought and he was horrified-he made me go to the nearest ER right away. While there the emergency room doctor removed the bandage and a smell like stale sweat socks came from the wound, which had gotten so big there was actually a visible hole in the leg-long story short it was gangrene which my surgeon said was caught just in time to save the lower part of my leg. After 2 operations and a skin graft everything turned out fine. According to the hospital everything was done correctly and getting gangrene was just bad luck.
Your right. Error and neglect do happen here in our system. But the error and neglect evidenced in the story were systemic. The doctors didn’t do the MRI because they thought it was unnecesary, they were reluctant to schedule her for the scan because MRIs are very expensive, particularly in the UK, and they were sure she would be turned down. And even if she had been scheduled for the MRI, she would have had to wait for months if not a year or two. That wouldn’t have helped her either.
There are thousands of MRI machines in the US. In the UK, they have fewer than 100. If I remember correctly, they have fewer than 50. And its all because they have been deemed by NHS as “too expensive.” So, in the UK not only do they have doctors and nurses who make mistakes (they’re only human, after all), but in addition, they have a system that places the patient’s life and possible treatment on a scale of affordability and if you come out on the wrong end of that evaluation, you’re dead.
Not only that but when Princess Di had her accident in France, the paramedics were on the scene fairly quickly but didn’t get Di to the hospital until more than 90 minutes later. Why? Because the ambulance couldn’t just take her to the nearest hospital. In the French health-care system at the time, hospitals, by law, specialized in certain treatments. It took them 90 plus minutes for them to find which hospital they were supposed to take her to and that one happened to be far from where the crash was. While bureaucrats dithered, Princess Diana died.