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Patients who are admitted to hospital at the weekend suffering from a stroke are less likely to receive vital brain scans and more are more likely to die than those seen during the week, a study of NHS hospitals has found. A team from Imperial College London and the National Audit Office has found 350 people die within seven days of their stroke unnecessarily because they were admitted at the weekend, and a further 650 suffer serious disability. Among stroke patients admitted Sundays, 11 percent died within seven days, compared with less than nine percent of those admitted on Mondays....

Health service trusts are “imposing pain and inconvenience” by making patients wait longer than necessary, in some cases as long as four months, the study found. Executives believe the delays mean some people will remove themselves from lists “either by dying or by paying for their own treatment” claims the report, by an independent watchdog that advises the NHS. The Co-operation and Competition Panel says the tactic is one of a number used by managers that “excessively constrain” patients’ rights to choose where to be operated upon, and damage hospitals’ ability to compete for planned surgery. It claims unfair...

Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...

Almost 50,000 Health Service patients a year are dying while suffering from malnutrition in hospitals in England, shocking figures suggest. A Government report says official statistics which claim that just 239 people a year die from malnutrition in hospital are 'very misleading'. It warns than 200 times as many patients die while not properly nourished. Critics attacked ministers after it emerged that the report was delivered in August last year, but has only just been released. Health campaigners have said that elderly patients in particular are often treated as 'second class citizens' on wards.

Patients in Health Service hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail, scientists warned yesterday. They say frail and elderly patients do not get the help they need with meals, and nobody checks whether they get enough to eat. Despite years of Government promises to tackle poor hospital nutrition, food still arrives cold, and patients often miss out because meal times clash with tests and operations. The Daily Mail has been highlighting the scandal of old people not being fed properly in hospital as part of its Dignity for the Elderly campaign The latest figures show...

Health Care Reform: A study by the British Patients Association tells the true story about socialized medicine in Britain. It's one of willful and woeful neglect of millions, missed diagnoses, and elderly patients left in pain.BD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For FailureWhile reading this disturbing analysis of the pitiful state of medical care in Britain in the Daily Telegraph, the Vincent Price horror classic "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" came to mind. Price portrayed a man who used bizarre methods to dispatch his victims. The abominable British National Health Service, based on this report, is only slightly better. The...

Medical Care: We took a lot of heat for using Stephen Hawking as an example of someone who'd suffer under a socialized health system. But a closer look at the treatment he got in the U.K. shows it wasn't all roses.As our Aug. 1 editorial put it: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Now, Hawking is British and — though he suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou...

'Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed One million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain, according to a major report released today. By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor 27 Aug 2009 In the last six years, the Patients Association claims hundreds of thousands have suffered from poor standards of nursing, often with 'neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel' treatment. The charity has disclosed a horrifying catalogue of elderly people left in pain, in soiled bed clothes, denied adequate food and drink, and suffering from repeatedly cancelled operations, missed diagnoses and...

Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds. The lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk as births in locations ranging from lifts to toilets - even a caravan - went up 15 per cent last year to almost 4,000. Additionally, overstretched maternity units shut their doors to any more women in labour on 553 occasions last year. Babies were born in offices, lifts, toilets and a caravan, according to the Freedom of Information data for 2007 and 2008 from 117 out of 147 trusts...

The huge extent to which the NHS needs foreign doctors to treat patients out of hours is revealed today. A third of primary care trusts are flying in GPs from as far away as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland because of a shortage of doctors in Britain willing to work in the evenings and at weekends. The stand-ins earn up to £100 an hour, and one trust paid Polish and German doctors a total of £267,000 in a year, a Daily Mail investigation has found. It raises fresh concerns that British patients are being treated by exhausted doctors...

Over 45,000 NHS staff call in sick every day, which is lowering standards of patient care, according to the first national NHS Health and Wellbeing Review into staff habits. The NHS loses 10.3 million working days annually due to sickness absence alone, costing £1.7 billion per year. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said the figures were "very depressing" but reflected broader problems with public health in society as a whole. He told GMTV: "They are very depressing figures, and they show that the NHS itself has to do better. "But I think they also reflect a light on a problem...

In a Friday story headlined "Britons Fault Health Service, Until Someone Else Does," Times London correspondent Sarah Lyall singled out Republican criticism of British health care, citing tiny protests, larger Twitter campaigns, and exercised editorials in The Economist magazine about "irresponsible distortions" by conservatives in America. While Britons love to complain about waiting lists, disparities in treatment, "infection-breeding hospitals" and "top-heavy bureaucracy," they are seemingly unanimous in opposition to Obama critics: They are furious, for example, that the health service is being held up as an example of the failures of socialized medicine by Americans opposed to President Obama’s health...

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address comes to mind. In the art of persuasion, it's often most effective to paint in brief, colorful strokes. A savvy reader with the handle "Jerseyvet" made an incisive observation after perusing my latest column concerning Obamacare: "Start out with the premise that the demand for health care is infinite, but the supply is finite," he wrote. "So health care has to be rationed. I trust the market, unfettered by governmental restrictions, more than the government. The Canadian and British systems of health care reinforce my belief." Jerseyvet – clearly one of those acerbate, "un-American" town hall "astroturfers"...

Medical Care: A leaked report shows that Vancouver's health authority is considering cutting thousands of surgeries to balance the budget. However organized, government-run health care inevitably leads to rationing.Defenders of ObamaCare continually point out that their plan is not like Canada's, that holding that country's system up as an example of impending medical doom is invalid. Canada's system is different. Instead of having a single national plan, Canada's national health insurance, a kind of public option, is composed of 13 interlocking provincial and territorial plans, all framed under the Canada Health Act. But based on a report leaked to the...

President Ronald Reagan once said “federal programs are the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth.” There is a timely reminder of Reagan’s maxim in the weekend’s headlines from across the Big Pond in Britain, where Tory leader David Cameron went out of his way to reassure voters there that he and his party are just as committed to defending the National Health Service as the Labor Party. “No one should be in any doubt, for the Conservative Party, the NHS is our number one priority,” Cameron told the Daily Mail Online. Cameron was reacting...

Late last week, Conservative Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, appeared on Fox News. His statement that the US should not attempt to create a new health care system, based on the British model of the National Health Service (NHS), ignited a firestorm in England. On Friday morning, the British airwaves and print media, not to mention the blogosphere, went into overdrive with comments which amounted to a national self examination verging on a societal inquisition. Full marks to Steven Glover for his analysis in The Daily Mail. He wrote what most Brits would categorize as “the bleeding obvious.”...

A young mother gave birth on a pavement outside a hospital after she was told to make her own way there. Mother-of-three Carmen Blake called her midwife to ask for an ambulance when she went into labour unexpectedly with her fourth child. But the 27-year-old claims she was refused an ambulance and told to walk the 100m from her house in Leicester to the city's nearby Royal Infirmary. 'They said they were not sending an ambulance and told me I had had nine months to sort out a lift.'

Gordon Brown, prime minister, and David Cameron, leader of the Conservative opposition party, on Friday both declared their commitment to the National Health Service. Some Republicans have ridiculed it as a bureaucratic and “Orwellian” system that often denies care to the elderly – with Sarah Palin, the former Republican presidential candidate, decrying it as “evil”. But in Britain, where since 1948 all citizens have enjoyed free healthcare from birth to death, the attacks are widely seen as wrong and insulting. Mr Cameron, who leads the Conservative party, once headed by Margaret Thatcher, on Friday described the NHS as one of...

of the service cuts two ways, say researchers from Civitas, a British think tank. They argue that the "customer" of the National Health Service (NHS) -- Great Britain's government-run health care model -- is the health secretary rather than the patient. The report sees much in favor of attempting to introduce private provision within the state system and competition between NHS trusts to attract patients. But this has been stymied by incessant interference from the Department of Health, says researchers: According to health service managers, a staggering total of 69 public bodies -- excluding the Department of Health and 10...

Charities warned that patients with less common forms of cancer were being discriminated against, while others condemned the system as a “scandal”. Patients and their doctors can appeal for the NHS to pay for drugs not currently licensed for that type of the disease. But one in three applications were turned down in the last three years, leaving patients having to pay up £20,000 for the medication themselves. The Rarer Cancers Forum, who obtained the figures, said that patients in France were up to 55 per cent more likely to get so-called “near-label” treatment, drugs licensed for a similar disease,...