News out of the United Kingdom today reveals that a lack of compassion is putting UK patients at risk. Britain's national health system has been held up as highly efficient and admired for covering all its citizens. But the relentless pursuit of efficiency required to maintain the system has cost them something else:
Nurses and doctors cannot spend as much time as they should with patients, and are sidelining essential care elements such as diet, pain control and hygiene because NHS targets are driven by the need to satisfy budgets rather than by care and quality.
Technical advances have made medicine more efficient but less humane, the report claims, and warns that government plans to tackle malnourishment and MRSA, as well as to give patients more dignity, are destined to fail unless compassion is restored to the heart of health care.
This issue is also at play in the U.S. health system, and points again to a truth we discussed in an earlier post. In our efforts to control spiraling costs we run the risk of developing a system that is only good for the system - that is, for the products and services offered - and not necessarily good for people. Health ministers in the U.K. are seeing the same thing:
Andrew Lansley, shadow Health minister, said the report was an indictment of the way the Government had organised the NHS. "This is not a criticism of NHS staff but of the ethos that has been created in the health service," he said. "They are working in systems designed around throughput and not quality. This report sends a message to managers that they must create a work ethos where compassion and quality are at the centre of health care. Efficiency and compassion are not incompatible but targets and finances should not be ahead of patient safety."
The U.S. health care system is in dire need of reform, and the solution must be a uniquely American one. We believe our health system can be both compassionate and efficient. Compassion doesn't cost anything, but as we are now seeing from the U.K.'s example, we do have to make room for it. Patient care and dignity must be the nucleus around which the rest of the system revolves.
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