Heart of Darkness...

Stand aside Joseph Conrad. Forget 'Apocalypse Now.' The true heart of darkness in the NHS has just been revealed in this item heard today on the wireless.

A Nursing Sister telephoned a 'call-in' programme to say that in her Accident and Emergency unit it has become common practice to keep people waiting on hospital trolleys, prior to agreed admission to the hospital, for hours on end in order to achieve the wretched Government target of no one waiting for more than four hours in said A&E.

How, you might reasonably ask, is the deliberate withholding of appropriate, agreed admission a way of achieving a target to reduce waiting time? It works - if one can call such perversity 'working' - like this:

If there is a shortage of hospital beds - as there often is - to permit the steady admission of patients from A&E to hospital wards then inevitably a number of people will have to wait for said admission. So far, so simple. What though can and does happen is that a number of these pre-admission patients slip over the four hour threshold. Bad news for the target figures and not good news for them naturally.

What though next occurs is utterly reprehensible.

If there are other people who later are waiting for admission, when a bed becomes available they are given preferential admission, because their admission - prior to the four hour cut-off point - will count as a unit towards the target. Those people who have exceeded the four hours are essentially dead meat: who cares from the perspective of statistical returns whether they wait five or fifteen hours?

Please don't let Bro. Charles read this or he may end up in intensive - and as H rightly points out intensely expensive - care!