NHS

[Andrew MacLean]

Ah, but provincial hospitals, and those in Scotland, seem to manage a far quicker turn around than London hospitals do.

[Sweet]

Yes Wales is far quicker as well! But this is probably much more to do with the overall numbers, with London having way too many people struggling to get seen at Moorfields!

Sweet X x X

[jayboi2005]

Its not only London it is the North West as well.

[Andrew MacLean]

The answer is simple. The nice people in Lopndon should move to Scotland, Wales and the North of England.

OR

They need more hospitals in London.

[John Smith]

... but then we'd need more nurses, and we can't get enough of those at the moment anyway

[Andrew MacLean]

The scandal is that we expect the Third World to subsidise our NHS. It takes something of the order of £70 000 to educate a nurse. The NHS recruits in Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Phillipines and in all sorts of places.

This strips nurses out of already impoversihed Health provision, and counts as a substantial subsidy to our NHS by the tax payers in very poor contries.

We ought to bite the bullet and start recruiting from the third World into our Nurse training, so that the skills gained by the student nurses can be at our expense and then enable them (perhaps after a period of contracted service) to take their skills home to the benefit of their own countries.

Andrew

[Sweet]

They are given a short term contract though once employed over here so they do have the right to leave and go home soon. The main problem is that they get so used to more money as they send most of it home, and then find it impossible to leave! Then all of a sudden they are looking for more regular work, taking all the agency shifts, (not being funny here but most philipines i have worked with do 7 day shifts) and next thing their family are coming over.

Maybe we are giving to much of a bad thing in needing staff and recruiting from abroad as we are taking them away from countriles that need them, having to teach them english so that they can nurse here and then finding that they don't want to leave. They get very cheap accomodation near to the hospital, discounted food, travel expenses and still work 24/7 by choice.

I think more emphasis should be put into training nurses here, paying them more so that they don't do the same thing as nurses from third world countries do in coming to see us, by leaving to nurse in NZ or Australia where the money is better so getting better highly motivated staff.

.... but this is just my view

Sweet X x X

[Andrew MacLean]

We have no basis for complaining about the drain of UK trained staff to other economies when we go out of our way to deny poorer economies the staff they need.

A friend who teaches economics calculated that the Zimbabwe economy sends aid (in the form of trained nurses) to us that is greater than our aid budget to them. The net result is that we make Zimbabwe poorer.

Andrew

[Sweet]

Exactly!

[jayuk]

Andrew

You make a good pointl but right now the UK Nursing sector is in a downworld spiral....steming from lack of vision and thought. The salaries are just plainly not acceptable and havent been for a while; and whilst there have a number of financial based inititative within the past 24 months; the fruits of this; if ever; will take a while.

What we get in the mean time, is dissatisfied nurses not doing there jobs to the standard they want to due to moral...and this is portayed in there attitude and manor in which they come across.

Sadly; this is becoming more prevalent across the UK; and I can give countless examples; both personally and from associates; whereby the response and communication given from Nurses is simple not acceptable.

An example here was last month where I had to visit a family member in one of Londons most prestigious hospitals; in their ICU dept. The way the nurses treated and spoke to visitors across the whole dept was out right appaling; and when immediate family would ask concerned questions about the patient; the response was abrupt and outright rude.......and rather be proactive in treating my family member, they were moer reactive and would take considerable amounts of time actually getting things done......afterwhich I had no choice but to take the nurse aside and have a word with her.......and make a complaint the both the Consultant and the Head Nurse. (to which I mite add was just as useless)_

We just need to ensure that the "good ones" remain there and dont get swallowed up by the private sector.... (or alternatively the NHS finaly gets the Bined and goes Private..which WILL happen....within, I predict, 15-20 years....maybe sooner!

J