Posted on 03/27/2006 9:08:03 AM PST by NYer
PREMATURE babies requiring expensive hospital care have been described as “bed blockers” by one of the country’s leading medical colleges.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) says that the ability of doctors to keep alive babies born under 25 weeks presents difficulties for the treatment of other infants. Its comments were made in a submission to an inquiry by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics into the ethics of prolonging life in foetuses and the newborn.
The RCOG paper states: “Some weight should be given to economic considerations as there is a real issue in neonatal units of “bed blocking”, whereby women have to be transferred in labour to other units compromising both their and their babies’ care.
“One of the problems of the ‘success’ of neonatal intensive care is that the practitioners are always pushing boundaries. There has been a constant need to expand numbers of cots to cover the increasing tendency to try and rescue babies at lower and lower gestations.”
The college’s paper was submitted in July 2005 but its content has been highlighted as NHS trusts come under growing pressure to cut costs and use resources more efficiently.
The RCOG said last night: “There is a proper professional concern around the high death and handicap rate in babies born under 25 weeks. A wellinformed and considered debate is welcomed.”
Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said yesterday that admitting patients who were unfit for surgery or arrived early for operations was blocking beds and costing the NHS up to £200 a day each.
Some trusts are admitting up to 60 per cent of patients the day before surgery. Ms Hewitt said that if all the trusts with above-average early admissions met the national average it would save at least 390,000 bed days a year at a saving of £78 million.
“Improved patient care and increased efficiency go hand in hand,” she said.
“Finding out a patient is unfit for surgery, which could have been established by a separate assessment before the operation, is another example of a wasted bed day.”
A pilot scheme in Croydon where orthopaedic patients waiting for surgery at Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust visited the hospital for routine pre-surgery tests and administration two weeks before their operationsaved 13 beds and £270,000 in the first year while treating the same number of patients.
Dr Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “Reducing inpatient admissions and lengths of stay in hospitals will result in real savings, but only if capacity is reduced as a result — which may mean closing beds and wards.
“A fixation with hospital buildings is preventing the development of new and imaginative services. We will have to work hard to convince the public that, with technological advances and a shift to providing more care out of hospitals, the loss of beds and wards doesn’t necessarily equate to a decline in services for patients.”
Every premature baby they kill just shortens the time until the followers of mohamad take over.
Then it will be the baby murder's blood that flows.
Socialized medicine means only the healthy are allowed to live..
>>>>The Nazis didn't start with the Jews or the gypsies. They started with terminal patients and the mentally ill.
That pretty much sums up my feelings on National Health systems.
Never has, and never will... Pity more "educated" people cannot see that...
the infowarrior
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