Do You Smoke?: Twelve Easy Steps to Figuring Out
Ted Bromund /
Britain’s National Health Service is under fire, again, this time for the hideous conditions in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust that killed between 400 and 1200 patients in a three year period. As always, bad news encourages others to come forward. An anonymous NHS doctor has just leaked [1] the flow-chart he is supposed to use to answer the simple question “Do you smoke?” It is incomprehensibly complex.
But it’s worse than that. The failures in Mid Staffordshire occurred because institution’s managers were so obsessed by meeting centralized targets and winning Trust status in order to escape that control that they ignored their responsibility to care for their patients. (more…)