That seems like a… ‘brave’ thing for a politician to say.
And the Senedd has too many conts, what else is new
Renowned Dickhead makes no attempt to not look like even more of a dickhead.
Seriously I don’t mind him, but fuck has he only taken Ls since he took high office.
Ever tried getting your elderly relative to their regular appointments when its a 45 minute drive away. Mark Drakeford has not and clearly thinks that making it a longer journey will have no consequences
It the physical geography of the place that requires the number of hospitals. Journey times. Look at a damn map Mark Drakeford and consider for at least one minute that we don’t all live in Cardiff.
Yes just send more patients to Hereford,Shrewsbury,Telford and Gobowen
Because taking the Gwent, Neville Hall, and County and putting them in a singular hospital outside the major population centre of that region has gone swimmingly…
I don’t know what planet Drakeford lives on, but it’s absent of anything like reality.
It’s an interesting approach. I do agree that the system outside of hospitals has been neglected majorly. Especially GPs. I don’t necessarily think that there are ‘too many hospital beds’ – it’s more a case that too many are being used by people who don’t necessarily need one, but can’t be managed due to cuts/failings outside the hospital system.
Exactly where would he propose making the cut? The hospitals in mid- and north-west Wales probably (I don’t know the actual figures) serve a relatively low number of people; but these people are very spread out and have very little rail and fast roads. Cutting a hospital in some places will leave people several hours from their next nearest one.
Oh God. I hate to agree with Drakeford, but he might not be wrong.
Larger, better, well resourced centres of excellence can improve outcomes for a number of conditions. HASUs for stroke is a good example (and one where despite the evidence of benefit we don’t have any in Wales).
The problem is, that needs to be supplemented with good community care, so you might go to a hospital further away for acute and emergency care, but have follow up care and appointments in a more local setting.
People are right to point out what a disaster our current health service in Wales is, but that is a symptom of the problem he is pointing out.
Either way, I don’t see any chance of reform any time soon. These solutions are far too politically controversial, including even with NHS staff. There is no chance of the Welsh Government putting forward anything this radical and instead the managed decline (and even that is being generous these days) will continue.
He has a point. Investing in hospitals when primary care is broken makes no sense. GPs prevent people getting so bad that they need to go to hospital in the first place. The hospitals would have more beds if Janice could actually go home with a care plan and help from community nurses. Trying to fix hospitals before the 2 things that they need to function well is nuts. A hospital is not a GP surgery or a Nursing home.
While I hate agreeing with Drakeford, there is a certain amount of logic to what he is saying. However, he is looking at hospitals and beds in isolation. The decision process has to take into account external elements like public transport.
People’s access to hospitals can be very limited because of transport. When you have large hospitals it is worth bus companies setting up routes to the hospital. When you have regional satellite treatment centres will the bus companies be willing to maintain routes with fewer passengers?
madness
As someone currently pregnant in Wales, with my local hospital shut due to incompetence, and the offered alternative being an hour away from home, I’m so disappointed with Welsh labour. I wish I lived in England, and I never have wanted that before. The care throughout pregnancy has been awful, and now when I go into labour I need to travel really far to a hospital where one in three baby deaths could have been prevented.
Is he out of his feckin’ mind?
As a resident of Wales who has been on an NHS waiting list for 18 months, I find this bizarre.
Comments on this show you just how hard it is to reform the NHS and make it better. Lots of people in hospital don’t need to be there and would be better (and more cheaply) served by improved primary care. There’s also a specialisation benefit- medicine is complicated and becoming more so. Outcomes and training are improved by increased specialisation. Specialists work best when they’ve got a lot of peers who they can bounce ideas off and also check each other’s work.
But the knee jerk reaction is just to shout at him because the care’s bad right now.
Maybe if there were more gp surgeries. They built new houses but never more surgeries. More people same amount of doctors
Assuming there’s doctors to staff them of course
He has a point. He’s saying that prevention and primary care have more patient contacts and are disproportionately underfunded. If more money is spent on primary care, fewer people end up being shunted into hospitals. Hospitals have been taking over primary care as GP service are overloaded. Waiting lists would be far shorter if we had better primary care. A&E is full of people who are only there because they have no other options. The same goes for under investment in social care, rehab, etc. A large proportion of people in hospital beds have preventable conditions. They’ve been failed by primary care. And it’s much much cheaper to prevent illness than it is to treat it.
So despite the usual “guhh Drakeford bad” knee-jerk reactions, he’s not saying that we should be closing hospitals. He’s saying that if we started with a clean slate, far more funding should be put into prevention and primary care so that the hospitals could focus on the stuff they should be doing – surgery and specialist treatment.
15 years ago there was a “South Wales Plan” to close a district general hospital on the M4 corridor – most likely Royal Glamorgan. But it never got anywhere, mainly because the population would head to Cardiff or Bridgend for treatment instead of up to Merthyr.
Lots of study has gone into this previously and the for and against argument for smaller hospitals and more of them V larger hospitals and less of them will keep going on and on. Typical politician probably looking at it from a very skewed perspective.
build mega hospitals with all the specialties and turn the DGHs into cottage hospitals with resident cote docs could be feasible you know
I worked in the emergency services and there’s a distinct lack of hospitals and beds not the other way around. From a south Wales perspective it’s not to bad and his plan may have some credit but north and mid patients have long travel times and incredibly long wait times just to be seen in emergencies. Yes there’s a lower population in these areas but closing centres just exacerbates the problem. There are no beds availiable up north. People are dying because of it. If anything more resources are needed to increase the number of beds to remove the pressure of the ambulance service. But there also needs to be simultaneous funding in community care so people can be seen and cared for in the community. Preventing elderly and vulnerable patients from taking up beds as they have no where else to go. Which isn’t there fault at all by the way. You can’t fix one problem by destroying another part of the services .
I highly recommend watching the full interview on the For Wales See Wales podcast because the BBC made the statement more controversial than it was. The conversation was about how he wanted to invest more money in primary care, so not just GP’s but walk-in physiotherapy centres, etc, but that money is being taken up by hospitals. The BBC have focused on one line in a five minute segment
Too many hospitals and too many beds… the biggest hospital near me has 400 and something beds and desperately need more. The fuck is Drakeford on about?
I can sort of see his point,when the Grange in Cwmbran opened they moved doctors and nurses from other hospitals to there.So having a new hospital didn’t make wait times go down they just split them over more sites and added to running costs .We need more doctors and nurses and have to improve preventive medicine
25 comments
That seems like a… ‘brave’ thing for a politician to say.
And the Senedd has too many conts, what else is new
Renowned Dickhead makes no attempt to not look like even more of a dickhead.
Seriously I don’t mind him, but fuck has he only taken Ls since he took high office.
Ever tried getting your elderly relative to their regular appointments when its a 45 minute drive away. Mark Drakeford has not and clearly thinks that making it a longer journey will have no consequences
It the physical geography of the place that requires the number of hospitals. Journey times. Look at a damn map Mark Drakeford and consider for at least one minute that we don’t all live in Cardiff.
Yes just send more patients to Hereford,Shrewsbury,Telford and Gobowen
Because taking the Gwent, Neville Hall, and County and putting them in a singular hospital outside the major population centre of that region has gone swimmingly…
I don’t know what planet Drakeford lives on, but it’s absent of anything like reality.
It’s an interesting approach. I do agree that the system outside of hospitals has been neglected majorly. Especially GPs. I don’t necessarily think that there are ‘too many hospital beds’ – it’s more a case that too many are being used by people who don’t necessarily need one, but can’t be managed due to cuts/failings outside the hospital system.
I think this line is relevant to the conversation https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/65Ek2P97nQ
Exactly where would he propose making the cut? The hospitals in mid- and north-west Wales probably (I don’t know the actual figures) serve a relatively low number of people; but these people are very spread out and have very little rail and fast roads. Cutting a hospital in some places will leave people several hours from their next nearest one.
Oh God. I hate to agree with Drakeford, but he might not be wrong.
Larger, better, well resourced centres of excellence can improve outcomes for a number of conditions. HASUs for stroke is a good example (and one where despite the evidence of benefit we don’t have any in Wales).
The problem is, that needs to be supplemented with good community care, so you might go to a hospital further away for acute and emergency care, but have follow up care and appointments in a more local setting.
People are right to point out what a disaster our current health service in Wales is, but that is a symptom of the problem he is pointing out.
Either way, I don’t see any chance of reform any time soon. These solutions are far too politically controversial, including even with NHS staff. There is no chance of the Welsh Government putting forward anything this radical and instead the managed decline (and even that is being generous these days) will continue.
He has a point. Investing in hospitals when primary care is broken makes no sense. GPs prevent people getting so bad that they need to go to hospital in the first place. The hospitals would have more beds if Janice could actually go home with a care plan and help from community nurses. Trying to fix hospitals before the 2 things that they need to function well is nuts. A hospital is not a GP surgery or a Nursing home.
While I hate agreeing with Drakeford, there is a certain amount of logic to what he is saying. However, he is looking at hospitals and beds in isolation. The decision process has to take into account external elements like public transport.
People’s access to hospitals can be very limited because of transport. When you have large hospitals it is worth bus companies setting up routes to the hospital. When you have regional satellite treatment centres will the bus companies be willing to maintain routes with fewer passengers?
madness
As someone currently pregnant in Wales, with my local hospital shut due to incompetence, and the offered alternative being an hour away from home, I’m so disappointed with Welsh labour. I wish I lived in England, and I never have wanted that before. The care throughout pregnancy has been awful, and now when I go into labour I need to travel really far to a hospital where one in three baby deaths could have been prevented.
Is he out of his feckin’ mind?
As a resident of Wales who has been on an NHS waiting list for 18 months, I find this bizarre.
Comments on this show you just how hard it is to reform the NHS and make it better. Lots of people in hospital don’t need to be there and would be better (and more cheaply) served by improved primary care. There’s also a specialisation benefit- medicine is complicated and becoming more so. Outcomes and training are improved by increased specialisation. Specialists work best when they’ve got a lot of peers who they can bounce ideas off and also check each other’s work.
But the knee jerk reaction is just to shout at him because the care’s bad right now.
Maybe if there were more gp surgeries. They built new houses but never more surgeries. More people same amount of doctors
Assuming there’s doctors to staff them of course
He has a point. He’s saying that prevention and primary care have more patient contacts and are disproportionately underfunded. If more money is spent on primary care, fewer people end up being shunted into hospitals. Hospitals have been taking over primary care as GP service are overloaded. Waiting lists would be far shorter if we had better primary care. A&E is full of people who are only there because they have no other options. The same goes for under investment in social care, rehab, etc. A large proportion of people in hospital beds have preventable conditions. They’ve been failed by primary care. And it’s much much cheaper to prevent illness than it is to treat it.
So despite the usual “guhh Drakeford bad” knee-jerk reactions, he’s not saying that we should be closing hospitals. He’s saying that if we started with a clean slate, far more funding should be put into prevention and primary care so that the hospitals could focus on the stuff they should be doing – surgery and specialist treatment.
15 years ago there was a “South Wales Plan” to close a district general hospital on the M4 corridor – most likely Royal Glamorgan. But it never got anywhere, mainly because the population would head to Cardiff or Bridgend for treatment instead of up to Merthyr.
Lots of study has gone into this previously and the for and against argument for smaller hospitals and more of them V larger hospitals and less of them will keep going on and on. Typical politician probably looking at it from a very skewed perspective.
build mega hospitals with all the specialties and turn the DGHs into cottage hospitals with resident cote docs could be feasible you know
I worked in the emergency services and there’s a distinct lack of hospitals and beds not the other way around. From a south Wales perspective it’s not to bad and his plan may have some credit but north and mid patients have long travel times and incredibly long wait times just to be seen in emergencies. Yes there’s a lower population in these areas but closing centres just exacerbates the problem. There are no beds availiable up north. People are dying because of it. If anything more resources are needed to increase the number of beds to remove the pressure of the ambulance service. But there also needs to be simultaneous funding in community care so people can be seen and cared for in the community. Preventing elderly and vulnerable patients from taking up beds as they have no where else to go. Which isn’t there fault at all by the way. You can’t fix one problem by destroying another part of the services .
I highly recommend watching the full interview on the For Wales See Wales podcast because the BBC made the statement more controversial than it was. The conversation was about how he wanted to invest more money in primary care, so not just GP’s but walk-in physiotherapy centres, etc, but that money is being taken up by hospitals. The BBC have focused on one line in a five minute segment
Too many hospitals and too many beds… the biggest hospital near me has 400 and something beds and desperately need more. The fuck is Drakeford on about?
I can sort of see his point,when the Grange in Cwmbran opened they moved doctors and nurses from other hospitals to there.So having a new hospital didn’t make wait times go down they just split them over more sites and added to running costs .We need more doctors and nurses and have to improve preventive medicine
Comments are closed.