The horrors of socialized medicine: Man has testicle mistakenly removed as overwhelmed U.K. surgeons make thousands of mistakes (with zero accountability)

Thursday, February 25, 2016 by: Daniel Barker
Tags: socialized medicine, NHS, medical error

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(NaturalNews) Great Britain's socialized health care system has been responsible for more than 1,100 serious medical mistakes in the past four years, according to a recent article published by The Telegraph.

Patients of the National Health Service (NHS) have become victims of hundreds of "never events" – medical mistakes so egregious that they should never happen in any hospital. These never events include such horror stories as a man whose testicle was mistakenly removed instead of a cyst, and a woman who had one of her kidneys removed instead of an ovary.

From The Telegraph:

"The 'never events' also include a woman having her fallopian tubes removed instead of her appendix, the wrong hips, legs, eyes and knees being operated on, and diabetic patients not being given insulin.

"More than 400 people have suffered due to 'wrong site surgery', while more than 420 have also had "foreign objects" left inside them after operations - including gauzes, swabs, drill guides, scalpel blades and needles. ...

"One patient had a biopsy taken from their liver instead of their pancreas.

"Other patients have suffered when feeding tubes which are meant to be fed into their stomach have been put into their lung instead. This can prove fatal."

The list of SNAFUs goes on to include patient mix-ups, overdoses of dangerous drugs, installation of the wrong implants or joint replacements, escapes of prisoners who were being treated (presumably they are among the lucky ones, considering the NHS track record), and patients receiving the wrong blood type during transfusions.

The NHS has tried to downplay the seriousness of the problem, with one spokeswoman saying:

"One never event is too many and we mustn't underestimate the effect on the patients concerned. However there are 4.6 million hospital admissions that lead to surgical care each year and, despite stringent measures put in place, on rare occasions these incidents do occur."

Statistically rare as these incidents may be, there are obviously some major problems with the system – particularly at certain facilities, such as Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, where nine "never events" were reported between April and December of 2015.

'Soviet-style' health care

At least one British politician has blamed the country's socialized health care system as being at the root of the problem.

As reported by Breitbart:

Earlier this month the Labour Peer Lord Carter concluded that some NHS hospitals were being run on "Soviet-style models with an attitude of 'you are lucky to have it, now wait in a queue.'"

In the worst examples of badly run hospitals, he found that management had devoted twice as much space to a bloated bureaucracy than they had to patients.

In the same week a senior cancer specialist warned that the Service was "on its knees" thanks to "thousands of health tourists" from across the European Union using the service to get free treatment.

Lord Carter was commissioned by British health secretary Jeremy Hunt last year to investigate the state of the NHS. In his report, which was published earlier this month, the Labour Peer concluded that the system needs an overhaul to cut spiraling costs and rampant inefficiency.

Responding to claims that cutting costs could "endanger patient safety," Lord Carter wrote, "My experience of the best of the NHS and other health care systems internationally shows that the provision of high quality clinical care and good resource management go hand-in-hand."

In other words, socialized medicine systems which aim to provide free or "affordable" health care to citizens, are often subject to bad management and the waste of resources, resulting in poor health care that actually costs more in the long run than a medical industry guided by free market principles.

Sources:

Telegraph.co.uk

Breitbart.com

Breitbart.com

Science.NaturalNews.com