Just my view...

Yesterday I had some sad news from my cousin back in New Zealand. Her mum, my aunt, who would have been 100 at the end of the year, had passes away. I always thought she would live forever.

One time when I visited her several years ago she said she was making soup ‘for the old lady across the road’. Said old lady was several years younger than my aunt.

She had a great life, and was much loved and cared for by her family, and importantly she hung to most of her marbles until the very end.

I hope I have inherited some of the same genes that she had.

The Man pointed out this headline in the local evening paper The Man and I have said to one another after reading similar articles that if either of us become get sick we would be off home like a robbers dog.

A woman left to bleed for 20 hours at an NHS hospital because staff did not have the time or equipment to treat her discharged herself and went private in desperation.

 

This is an article in the same paper 

One of London’s biggest hospitals is displaying a nurse’s name above each patient’s bed to show who is responsible for their care.

University College London Hospital, in Bloomsbury, writes the name of the nurse looking after each patient on its 1,107 beds, as well as the name by which each patient wishes to be addressed. The idea that patients be given a “named nurse” responsible for co-ordinating every aspect of their care was among recommendations made by the Francis. She said: “We want to make sure patients know who is looking after them and ensure that nurses know how patients would like to be addressed.”

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, in a speech at UCLH last week, said he wanted every NHS hospital to adopt the named nurse system. He said: “The buck always needs to stop with someone. And the patient has every right to know who that is”Howard Catton, head of policy at the Royal College of Nursing, said: “Trusts have got to have the right numbers of staff to be able to ensure that the named nurse concept is meaningful.

Hmm sounds a lot like primary nursing care, hang on it is the same as primary nursing care which is what has been practiced in New Zealand hospitals for years

Primary nursing has been described as “the assigned, fixed, visible accountability for

24hour care by one registered nurse for a group of patients throughout their hospital

stay”. It entails assigning one nominated registered nurse as the „primary nurse‟ who develops a plan of care for individual patients. The „associate nurse‟ continues this plan when the primary nurse is not on duty. The associate nurse or nurses (as invariably, due to the 24 hour nature of required care more than two nurses are needed), are not charged with the responsibility of developing major changes to the plan of care unless the clinical

Condition of the patient requires this I

This had been the model of nursing care since the early 1980s