From the Eastern Daily Press comes the story of the Hospital in East Anglia that has been penalised for working too fast. .
Ipswich Hospital which lost nearly £2.5m worth of funding by treating patients too quickly insisted yesterday it was working hard to ensure the mistake is not repeated.
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Well now, we cant have patients upsetting the NHS's quality management systems, what ever next.
The Hospital is apparently more than £16m in the red, had accidentally breached an agreement with a funding body which was designed to ensure that patients were treated in turn and had similar waits.
A hospital senior administrator described the episode as a "local glitch" and said it had no significant implications for hospitals nationally or for NHS funding; so that's ok then !
It was explained that the government wants patients to wait no longer than six months before seeing a hospital consultant. However Ipswich Hospital and the East Suffolk Primary Care Trusts (ESPCT) - which provide funds for treatment - agreed that patients should wait at least four months.
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Well now, we cant have patients upsetting the NHS's quality management systems, what ever next.
The Hospital is apparently more than £16m in the red, had accidentally breached an agreement with a funding body which was designed to ensure that patients were treated in turn and had similar waits.
A hospital senior administrator described the episode as a "local glitch" and said it had no significant implications for hospitals nationally or for NHS funding; so that's ok then !
It was explained that the government wants patients to wait no longer than six months before seeing a hospital consultant. However Ipswich Hospital and the East Suffolk Primary Care Trusts (ESPCT) - which provide funds for treatment - agreed that patients should wait at least four months.
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A spokeswoman said the arrangement was thought to be the best way to ensurethat no one jumped queues and that everyone was waiting a similar length oftime. But during the past two years hospital doctors had treated a number of patientsinside four months in breach of the agreement and the trusts refused topay. Clearly a bad move.
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The news comes just days after reports that Norfolk's biggest hospital is being pressed by health trusts to increase its waiting times for surgery tosave money.
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The county's cash-strapped primary care trusts have asked the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital to increase the time patients wait foroperations. It means hundreds of patients requiring operations such as hipand knee replacements, reckon-structure plastic surgery and urology surgerywill have to wait longer for treatment.
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In response to the latest funding issue, a spokeswoman for Ipswich Hospital said: "We made the agreement on the waiting times since it was thought to be the best way of ensuring that patients were seen on a first come, first served basis and that waiting times were equalised. In a number of cases we had breached the agreement - for understandable reasons, because we had sparecapacity - and as a result we treated patients too quickly. The trust srefused to pay, as they were entitled to.''
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The spokeswoman (clearly an administrator of the highest quality) added:''We are working hard to ensure that the mistake will not be made again.'' Well after all we can not have sick people being attended to early, that would never do it would upset the system.
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One could not make any of this nonsense up, it simply does not sound credible. However sadly it is all true. This story is just one example of how our once great nation is now run - by armies of robotic unthinking corporate system controlled automatons.
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