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Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that a flaw in the way emergency response software was set up to handle Category A responses in Great Britain may have cost hundreds of lives over the past ten years. Most ambulance services use an international computerized system designed in America and in the US version, a fall of more than 6 feet receives the maximum priority response. However, the government committee which governs its use in Great Britain decided that such cases should be deemed less urgent, and excluded from an eight minute category A target response time. If a call involved a fall of more than 6 feet it was designated a lower priority 'category B response' despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response. The flaw came to light after Bonnie Mason, 58, fell 12 feet down the stairs and died from a head injury after emergency controllers in Suffolk failed to identify her situation as 'life-threatening.'"
The actual event in question happened a year ago. Given the recent news in the USA - something to do with some sort of bill about healthcare, and the imminent UK general election, I find the timing from a right wing newspaper here in the UK to be highly sensational - especially since the issue has been corrected in the new version of the software, that was released and rolled out last year.
While I was a student there were two cases of someone in my group of a dozen friends having a serious medical problem and being told that there weren't resources in American hospitals, despite their good health insurance, to treat them promptly enough to prevent permanent disability. Both went to India and received immediate care that successfully fixed their problems
As a medical student I may be a bit idealistic, but AFAIK this sort of thing should not be possible for about half a dozen reasons. What sort of illness did your friends have, and why was no doctor in the whole country willing to treat it?
Indeed. The quality of heath care in the US is top notch ... if you can get it/afford it. It's that "if you can get it" that's the issue.
A little story. I'm Australian. We have free universal health care in Australia, like most other countries. And the quality of that healthcare is good. Better than in the UK, IMO (I've lived in both countries). Three months ago I was visiting relatives in the US. Unfortunately I suffered an acute illness that required hospitalisation. I should point out that I'm young (27) and healthy, and have never required admission to hospital before. Now as a visitor to the US for three weeks, naturally I have no insurance/employer/any other connection to the US.
I was only in the ER for 89 minutes. The bill was over $2000 USD for that hour and a half! What struck me most about the US system though, more than the COST, was the incredible inefficiency. A bill from the hospital got mailed. Then a separate bill from some other company who apparently had some role. Then another bill from the doctor himself (wtf, doesn't the doctor work for the hospital?). All this paperwork, all these separate entities at play. In Australia and most other countries, there's a single payer system. You pay nothing and a single (government) insurer picks up the bill. It works well, not because it's socialised (the hospitals/doctors themselves are still private enterprises), but because it's just more efficient. Health care providers don't have to chase down 100s of different insurers with different paperwork and different requirements. They just batch their bills up and a single entity pays them.
But I do admit that, although expensive, the doctor gave me excellent treatment. He did many tests (including ones that I thought were unnecessary, and probably wouldn't have been done in the same situation at home). This is probably why the cost was so huge.
So yes, US healthcare is excellent quality. And particularly so for more advanced or cutting edge treatments - you can often only get them in the US (mostly because most health research is still done in the US). But if you are poor, God help you, because you can't afford it. Or if you are a visitor like me - I'm not poor and I have private health insurance at home in Australia, but that doesn't mean Jack in the US.
Ironically, if I were an American visiting either Australia or the UK, and the same thing happened to me, I'd get the same treatment for free. THAT irritates me ... my tax dollars pay for treating US tourists, but they don't extend the same courtesy to me as a visitor to their country.