Cindy Corton, 35, was left with the bizarre injury after a drunken fall in a friend's bathroom in 2005. She was twice seen by hospital staff in the aftermath of the incident and an X-ray was carried out. But an inquest heard it took Mrs Corton, of Sleaford, Lincolnshire, two years to convince doctors that the handle was lodged in flesh of her bottom. By then what should have been a routine procedure to remove it had become much more dangerous. After two unsuccessful operations in 2007, Mrs Corton underwent further, much riskier surgery and died from massive blood loss at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre in June last year. Recording a narrative verdict, coroner Stuart Fisher criticised Dr Killian Mbewe, who first examined Mrs Corton at Grantham hospital. After the inquest, husband Peter Corton said: "Cindy got a very poor service from the NHS. "I'm sure she would have got better treatment in foreign countries."
This seems to be a case of doctors assuming that the patient is crazy and refusing to do their job. Yet the assumption that the situation would somehow ameliorate in a pay-per-use system is false. The main problem is that MDs, like lawyers, are a self-governing profession. They have no direct responsibility to the public – only to other MDs. As long as their colleagues vouch for them and they maintain good relationships with others in their profession, it does not matter how they treat their patients or whether they serve their patients at all – they are guaranteed to carry on.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for commenting and rest assured that any and all comments are welcome, whether positive or negative, constructive or distructive. Unfortunately, if you comment in this view I might not know about - please use the regular (Desktop) view.
I am using Disqus for commenting, but Blogger is not showing it so your comments may end up not being displayed - tell Google about it!