Hospitals can be dangerous

Patients should be treated in the community rather than in hospitals because they can be "dangerous places", some of the UK's leading doctors warned Wednesday. The state-funded National Health Service (NHS) Alliance, which represents GPs and primary care staff, said that all non-urgent care should be shifted from hospitals into the community as an "immediate imperative" to keep people safe. The appeal comes as the UK Government's new health adviser warned that a robust new culture was needed in the NHS to restore public trust to the health service. Professor Don Berwick, who has been appointed to lead a review of patient safety in the NHS in the wake of the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal, said that "zero harm" was the only way for the NHS to go, saying: "Why should we tolerate a single injury?" The NHS Alliance said that only the most serious cases should be treated in hospital, as they "dangerous places" shunned by their own medical staff, the Times newspaper said. In a letter to the newspaper the alliance's president Dr Chris Drinkwater and chairman Dr Michael Dixon said, "If we are to put people before numbers and achieve high quality of care, as well as keeping an NHS free at the point of need for future generations we must, as an immediate imperative, shift all non-urgent care from hospital into the community." The alliance is also calling for the appointment of a GP with the same level of seniority as the Chief Medical Officer. Dr Dixon told The Times, "We need to work towards the point when acute hospital admissions should be regarded as a failure rather than a default position. "Hospitals can be dangerous, particularly for older patients and those with long-term conditions. There is a risk of infection and nutrition is complicated for those who cannot feed themselves." "We should aim to keep them out of hospital as long as possible." Meanwhile, Prof Berwick, who used to advise US president Barack Obama, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper the NHS could become the safest health care system in the world, and should aspire to be as safe as the aviation industry. Citing the Mid Staffordshire "tragedy" as a catalyst for improvements, he said "Zero harm is morally and ethically the right way to go. Why should we tolerate a single injury? There is no reason why English health care cannot aspire to be and become the safest health care in the world." Many press reports suggested that because of the substandard care in the Mid Staffordshire hospital between 400 and 1200 more patients died between 2005 and 2008 than would be expected for the type of hospital. However, such 'excess' death statistics did not appear in the final Healthcare Commission report about the hospital's scandal of neglect of patients.