I stole this story from an eagle-eyed Dr Phillipa Whitford MP tweet.
That headline is a belter, a howler, the cringyest of cringy. Why? Well it looks bad doesn’t it? £46 fn million!!?? Yousaf must go? Bring back Freeman and make her resign before she retires again? The people have a right to know how this ‘SNP Scottish Government’ has let them down?
Normally with BBC Scotland you have to read down to the 28th paragraph for anything reassuring but this time, perhaps feeling the headline will do its job for the Union, they let us see the facts by only the second and third:
Hospital infections cost NHS Scotland more than £46m every year, new research has revealed.
The Glasgow Caledonian University led study found 1% of patients develop hospital associated infections (HAIs).
It compares favourably with previous estimates for the UK (7.8%) and recent figures from Europe (3%).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57942366
So, hospital infection in England is around 7 to 8 times higher? Be very careful not to get hurt if you cross the border.
And, it’s on average, 3 times higher in Europe?
Now that’s the news, headline news.
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
Stop Press !
Journalists vote BBC to be the most watched and most accurate Broadcaster in the world according to a recent poll* .
*This is based on figures from a BBC Poll of the journalists Kirsty Wark and Sarah Smith .
Emiliy Maitlis had a contrary view but has been disqualified as her comments are under a BBC investigation for ”presumed bias ” .
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James
They the most watched in the World
Ha bloody Ha
A simple piece of arithmetic
1.4 Billion Chinese do not listen to them
1.3 Billion Muslims do not
1.2 Billion Indians pay little attention
Already and without trying that is more than 50 % of the Worlds population
They are delusional fantasists when they use these words
“The Whole World”
Or similar and i am sick to the back teeth
Hearing such or similar terminology coming from their forked tongues
The fact of the matter that in global terms ABC (BBC ) Are rapidly becoming a irrelevance
Can be no other way now as the Sun sinks below the horizon of Empire
And Western capitalism withers and dies
With the Unstoppable rise of China
Economically and politically
Along with the strategic alliance now formed with Russia
Both Putin and Xi
Now openly invite the West to take them on
Why because they now know for certain
That they would smash the West and The West also know this is the case
E.G.
Chief of Nato land forces
Their is no way we can send our tanks onto a battlefield against Russian Tanks
It would be suicidal
Pentagon Chief
Warns Leaders to be extremely careful with words or action against China
Because if such escalated to full conflict
And China clearly states that any aggressive act against it will result in a full declaration of war which they will fight till the bitter end
And The West can no longer be certain of victory even with full deployment of all its resources and in all likelihood lose very badly as quite simply the west has neither the guts or resources to do so
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PremieroneUK—if we narrow down “the whole world” to the countries we have invaded/bombed/sanctioned over just the last three decades, then these people, refugees, destitute, desperate listen to the nonsense from the BEEB World Service (often in English) about the wondrousness of “England” (and it IS “England” they tend to use), and they try to make their way here, across a dangerous and exploitative world—the welcome they get from Boris and Priti is unsurpassed—not to mention the gutter press and the BBC.
“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free”—
—and the Anglo-Brit-Nats will send them back into dangerous seas.
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gavinochiltree
And with regards refugees
It will soon become a crime to rescue any in trouble whilst crossing the Channel
All thanks to Ugly Pittel
Who commenced her career as a political
Lobbyist for and on behalf of that most honest and useful of Companies
I do believe such Company was
British American Tobacco
Ah well i shall no longer donate to RNLI
as soon they will be none other than a criminal gang,worse than people trafficking gangsters
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Scotland funds SNHS £Billions.
Johnston 3% NHS rises. £1.5Billion cut?
NHS funding up from £139Billion to £145Billion.
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When Labour/LibDems were in power Hospital acquired infections were rampant. For example, 10% of all patients acquired MRSA infections in hospital. When the SNP formed the SG in 2007 a very comprehensive campaign was initiated, and sustained, in order to bring HAIs under control. Cleaners were brought back ‘in house’, handwashing was emphasised at every opportunity and hand gel dispensers placed outside wards etc for visitors to use. These and other measures brought infections down. MRSA infections halved.
The Health Secretary who achieved this? Nicola Sturgeon.
As the most recent figures show the campaign has been sustained to good effect.
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Got a source?
Dr Lazybones
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I also remember that being a a hugely significant policy change when the SNP got rid of private profit making cleaning ‘services’ (money grabbers) who had handed the contracts by the London HQ’d Labour branch office at Holyrood, I will have a look for any blurb on it and let you know if it’s still available…makes you wonder how many brown envelopes were circulating back when Liebour were at the helm.
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Ok, Professor Prolific here are a couple of references.
Firstly a SPICE report from Nov 2011. Pretty comprehensive. Title:Healthcare Associated Infections. It is a pdf file – SB_11-80.pdf so you might have to Google it by the title to get it. Not very good at doing links to pdfs.
Secondly, From Feb 2011: Routine MRSA screening for Scottish hospitals – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12550827. Just one of the many things they put in place to tackle infections in hospitals.
Will that do you because I am melting in this heat.
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Cheers
The chill is coming
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40 odd million pounds is peanuts in the overall budget for the Scottish health service. For perspective a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 31 yrs.
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It’s also tiny compared to the public money completely wasted by the Labour party with their PFI scams in Scotland, and sending £billions back to Westminster while facilitating people dying of hospital aquired infections etc. They really were more like the mafia than a political party in Scotland.
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Wow, not easy to find anything on this, there is a Guardian article from 2011, (by er unionist David Torrance) which is more about the SNP keeping the SNHS in public hands, apparently Labour branch office instigated the improvements to the SNHS, hmm I don’t think so.
Anyway, this is from The National, and mostly about food quality but cleaning services are also mentioned.
Ok to share such articles, like, I won’t be sued or anything?
https://www.thenational.scot/news/17860262.carolyn-leckie-englands-nhs-slow-learn-lesson/
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ArtyHetty,
Here is a link to a short article in the Nursing Times from Oct 2008 about cleaning, catering and pottering services being brought back in house
https://www.nursingtimes.net/archive/scotland-axes-outsourced-hospital-cleaning-20-10-2008/
As you will see from the article Ms Sturgeon had made the announcement about this move at the party conference a few days before.
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Labours’ damaging and destructive legacy of PFI etc in Scotland is still being felt and will for some time to come, some things can’t be easily fixed, not when a political party ties your country into very long and very very expensive long term contracts. Just unforegivable and the SNP need to point that out and shout about it. Scotland, do you want to be taken back to the days where this was a (supposed Scottish) government policy? Etc.
Labours’ policy on the SNHS are a site to behold, it’s an utter horror story. It does not bear thinking about if they were at the helm now, a terrifying idea in fact.
The Gruan article says that the SNHS had been under Scottish control for ages and ages, but doesn’t mention it was always independent of the ENHS, aside the money made available to it by the EngGov, of course.
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I assume the BBC article is based on the academic paper which can be read without a paywall here:
Manoukian et al (2021) Bed-days and costs associated with the inpatient burden of healthcare-associated infection in the UK. Journal of Hospital Infection v. 114 (https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(21)00190-0/fulltext )
The authors arrive at their cost figure of £46.35 million in part by calculating what is essentially an opportunity cost to NHS Scotland due to the bed-days associated with patients whose discharge is delayed by acquiring an infection. So the total inpatient cost of HAI is presented in terms of bed-days lost, bed-day costs, and cash costs.
The authors report that in Scotland 58,010 (95% confidence interval: 41,730–74,840) bed-days were estimated to be lost to HAI during 2018/19, costing £46.4 million (19m–129m). The total annual cost in the UK is estimated to be £774 million (328m–2,192m).
“The impact of lost bed-days in a system like the NHS results in an increase in waiting lists, which means that potential patients are delayed in accessing services. This size (in Scotland) of the loss equates to 159 beds or a small general hospital of 180 beds (assuming average bed occupancy of 88%) being occupied for a whole year with HAI cases.”
For further perspective, the authors note that: “In 2018/19 the total acute inpatient expenditure in Scotland was about £4 billion; this sets the total cost of HAI at ∼1.1% of the total ACUTE INPATIENT expenditure in NHS Scotland.” (my emphasis)
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The person who wrote the headline was aware that England’s Hospital acquired infection’s were 7 times Scotland’s and Europe’s were 3 times Scotland’s.
As The Prof wrote . . . That is the news.
Yet they chose to distract from the important facts.
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