If you feel optimistic about the future of health care in America, once again the Brits are here to remind you that you’re a naive idiot.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is urging the NHS in England to reduce the number of serious mistakes being made and save 6,000 lives over the next three years.
Mr Hunt said NHS trusts should draw up plans to halve “avoidable harm” such as medication errors, blood clots and bedsores by 2016-17…
The push – called Sign up to Safety – will be voluntary and reliant on individual trusts identifying how many mistakes they make and coming up with plans to reduce them by half.
“Urging”? “Voluntary”? Oh, okay. Well, maybe they’ll think about it, mate.
Just to show what a serious measure this is, the NHS plans to recruit 5,000 “safety champions.” Yay, safety champions! They’re like actual champions, except safe. This silly title is a wonderfully unintentional acknowledgment of failure, much like “Obamacare navigators.”
If something isn’t working, all you have to do is tell people to try harder, if they feel like it. Then you think of happy names for new levels of bureaucracy that cost even more tax money. Then you deposit your paycheck.
Ineptitude. Lack of accountability. Orwellian euphemisms. Welcome to the future of medicine, America. May God grant you good health, because you’re not going to get it from the government.