Re: ot Matt

And meanwhile, if we really did get the surge that was predicted, what would you do with people dying for lack of oxygen because the necessary beds were occupied by someone who should not be there (and with no obvious symptoms of anything) ?.

Thank god you aren't running anything vital.

And if there was a surge of desperate people in need of oxygen waiting in A&E for a bed, then what ?. Send the desperate people home as happened in Italy, while some old codger with nothing obviously wrong, bedblocks ?

Precisely... I also take a dim view of those criticising, but not able to offer any plausible alternative strategy. Its easy to carp from the sidelines when you don't have to make the difficult and uncomfortable decisions.

The health service chose to send dangerously infections people to a place full of the most vulnerable in society.

I'm not saying the government is doing everything right - far from it - but in this particular scenario the doctors on the ground should have been blocking their release, and their management right up the tree should have been backing them up.

If that had been done perhaps Boris (or Hancock) might have listened. He may have a useless education, but he's not a complete fool.

Andy

How about send the 'codgers' to the Nightingale hospitals?

We built enough of them, and they don't seem to have been used.

Andy

Who's the "you" in your statemtent; seeing I just said exactly what you did, plus *reported* what someone else said about Scotland with no personal comment??

Doctor's don't control the discharge of patients already medically fit. And if their discharge had been "blocked" the NHS would have ceased to function as far as treating new admissions was concerned.

At least an order of magnitude too few beds to make a difference, and not a safe or usable environment for frail old people.

The government built temporary hospitals to treat expected patients. They should have build temporary quarantine care centres for the elderly.

It's not rocket science. Plans for a contagion like Covid are something a competent health care service would have had in place. What happened in care homes was foreseeable.

My suspicion is that the health care management hierarchy is full of box tickers. They are given targets and they prioritise meeting targets above all other concerns, there is no push back if the targets compromise other capabilities. There is a general acceptance amongst staff that the organisation is "sub-optimal", but a general apathy about fixing problems.

A lot of people really do need to be sacked, I was only following orders is not good enough.

The rot set in with Thatcher (but other neo-liberals are available) and the dogmatic decision to take all power away from professionals (largely doctors in this case) and put it in the hands of general managers who are part of a fully centralised hierarchy. As you say, the only function of managers that is rewarded is slavish obedience to their line manager all the way up to the health department, and no expertise in medical matters is needed or wanted.

That seems problematic since it seems that many people are still testing positive even after recovery due to shedding of dead virus particles from the lungs.

Usual left-wing clap trap. I worked for the NHS for many years and I can categorically assure you that doctors are generally useless at management. It's not their job. There are FAR too many NHS scientific, medical and nursing employees who drift up the incrmental scales and 'buggins turn' jobs, who spend all their time as glorified administrators and pen pushers, then disappear at age 60 with a gold-plated final salary pension that they paid peanuts towards.

No they didn't. None of the people being discharged had any symptoms or they would not have been discharged. How do you know that it wasn't the care home staff who introduced the virus ?. Knowing the persistance of the viral particles and the (sometimes) lengthy incubation period, it is not possible to make bold statements or point the finger.

Except that the NHS was being frightened into moving these perfectly 'fit' and healthy people out to make room for the tsunami of very ill people that Imperial College were predicting.

I do wonder why this wasn't done. Had these nightingale hospitals actually been built at that point though ?.

So, the very type of people who should be in a care home and not clogging up an expensive bed in an acute hospital then ?.

I do wonder why this wasn't done. Had these nightingale hospitals actually been built at that point though ?.

===

A friend of my husband is with the firm that built one in ... Birmingham I think, They are now going to take it apart!

Am I right in thinking the buildings were not actually built? They use existing ones and turned them into hospital wards?

What a waste! They ought to have used to convalesce or test people.

What doctors used to do was decide policy and administrators (one per hospital plus a few clerical assistants; and matron of course ) implemented it.

I agree about over-promotion of time-served people whose faces fit, but very few medical managers do it full time, they do it generally for the power over colleagues rather than for the money.

Absolutely. What went wrong is that the care homes did not have access to adequate PPE for the purpose, training in how to use it, money for extra staff, or technical advice on isolation. Or adequate testing available.