The Health of Britain, Part XIV

The Care Quality Commission is the new health and social care regulator for England. It has powers to monitor and enforce healthcare quality of the government's National Health Service. This includes verifying "whether elderly people receive essential standards of care in 100 NHS hospitals throughout England."

Last week, the CQC published reports on 12 British hospitals. Three hospitals flunked -- in part for failing to provide adequate nutrition:

• people not being given the assistance they needed to eat -- meaning they struggled to eat and in some cases were physically unable to eat meals



• their nutritional needs not being assessed and monitored -- for example, not being weighed throughout their stay, making it impossible to determine if they were losing weight; or identified as malnourished without an action plan being put in place to address this



• people not being given enough to drink -- water left out of reach or no fluids given for long periods of time. In one case, a member of clinical staff described having to prescribe water on medicine charts to ensure patients got enough to drink.

According to the Daily Mail (U.K.), the CQC:

found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink.

Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year. Another 300 die malnourished.

Appalling--but a 25 percent failure rate is hardly surprising for socialized medicine.

(via reader Warren)