Marathon Pundit: Government-run health care botches swine flu care in Britain

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Government-run health care botches swine flu care in Britain

Here's the latest government-run health care story, once again from Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS), courtesy of The Times' Alpha Mummy blog:

Yes, more children will probably die in the swine flu epidemic. And it may well be partly because senseless bureaucracy is stopping child victims getting urgent medical help...

It was Saturday morning. My children had been taking Tamiflu for a couple of days, after our GP had diagnosed swine flu on the phone. Now both my husband and my younger son were looking worse. My husband has asthma and my son suffers from recurrent croup (for which he has been hospitalised twice). So I rang Out of Hours Urgent Care, who transferred us to NHS Direct. Surely, I thought, as probable swine flu victims my husband and son would be treatment priorities?

An arrogant telephone operative at NHS Direct told my asthmatic husband he probably didn’t have swine flu and had nothing to worry about. No treatment was offered. So I took my son to the NHS Walk-In Centre. There, when I mentioned Tamiflu, we were ushered into a separate room and then told we would not be seen by a doctor and must leave the building. Because we had swine flu. We should ring NHS Direct for help. I explained why that had failed, whilst my son’s coughing grew more ominous.

I refused to leave, I pleaded, I lost my temper. My child is sick, he is getting croup, he needs to be seen. Children die of this. At length, a kindly nurse arranged a GP Home Visit. We returned home to wait, but within two hours my son was struggling to breathe. A 999 call, ambulance, blue lights, hospital, steroids, oxygen. An emergency that could well have been avoided with the right medical treatment quicker. Admittedly, we got help quickly because I broke the rules given at the time of diagnosis: I rang for an ambulance myself rather than joining the queue for NHS Direct, as I’d been told to do in emergency. I wonder how long I would have waited in a telephone queue whilst my son struggled to breathe.