Glorious Tractor Production is up again Comrades!
Targets intended to cut long waits in hospital Accident and Emergency units have cost the NHS in England £2 billion over the past five years, an assessment of healthcare information has concluded.
The extra costs come from patients who are in danger of having to wait more than four hours in A&E – the target limit – and are admitted to hospital “just in case”. Many are later discharged the same day, suggesting they had no real need to be admitted, with today – Christmas Eve – having the highest proportion of patients sent out on the day of admission.
Primary care trusts have to pay as much as £1,000 per admission, compared with about £100 for a patient treated in A&E. So the costs of admitting a patient – even for less than a day – are large.
Data collected by the CHKS Group, an independent provider of healthcare information, suggest that over the past five years, about two million extra patients were admitted to hospital through A&E units in England.
The way they\’ve collected the statistics across the different nations of the UK seems to show that they\’re correct. My, how lucky we are to have such sensible people attempting to direct, in detail, 1.3 million people from the centre!
Great headline.
We need stories from the old Soviet Union when everyone worked so cleverly to thwart the 5 year plans.
My favourite is the concrete boot. The shoe factory managers’ major management success was to get the central planners to measure shoe production by weight.
Voila, an annual 12 ton concrete boot, size XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXL.