Here's your socialized medicine; a British hospital has been in violation of NHS procedures for years by failing to perform adequate testing of unborn babies. After a single ultrasound scan fails to detect a fetal heart beat, the nurses told expecting moms that their baby is stillborn and then schedule an abortion to remove the "dead" child. The government requires that three different types of scans be conducted before rendering this diagnosis. It is estimated that perhaps as many as 600 children may have been wrongly diagnosed as still born for the past seven years.
[...]It was revealed that staff at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff were only using one type of pregnancy scan on expectant mothers, which can lead to false diagnoses of miscarriage.
The error, which breaches NHS guidelines, was only discovered after pregnant Emily Wheatley almost aborted her daughter on false medical advice.
Ms. Wheatley, 31, was told she had suffered a ’silent miscarriage’ and needed to deliver her dead baby, but found out that unborn Ella, now eight months old, was still alive when she had a second scan at another hospital.
Ms. Wheatley and her dead baby.
Okay, hyperbole aside, it isn't murder, it's criminally negligent homicide. Under common and criminal law there must be one of three
mens rea (Latin for guilty mind) mental states present for a defendant to be charged with a criminal act: they are - intentionally, recklessly and with criminal negligence. Simply put, Criminal Negligence comes into play when a reasonable person should be aware of a consequence but fails to act to avoid that consequence.
Simple examples of mens rea:
- If you drive while drunk and kill someone, you ignored the consequences of your actions (drinking) which a reasonable person should have perceived and are charged with criminally negligent homicide.
- If you are sober and speeding and run a red light, killing a pedestrian, you are charged with manslaughter because you recklessly ignored the consequences of your action.
- If you hate an individual and run him over, killing him, you are charged with murder because you intended to kill him.
Adequate pre-natal testing was mandated by NHS regulations; in the hospital's failure to follow proscribed procedures to avoid certain consequences (the killing of healthy babies) they were negligent - these health care professionals should have perceived the risk - and caused the death of ... who knows how many children.
The estimated number of healthy babies (600) that may have been killed is predicated on a possible error rate of 3% using the single ultrasound scan. This means that the number of botched procedures at this hospital was approximately 20,000 over a seven year period. That's almost 55 a week, 11 babies per day that these incompetent asses endangered.
Story
here.
And if NHS procedures were ignored for babies, what other procedures were thrown out the window? How many other people (adults, teens, small children) did this hospital actually kill? And was this purposefully done in order to meet budgetary considerations? What other hospitals are cutting corners in order to stay under budget?
A two month old article from the UK
Telegraph:
The number of reported "never" events – which include operations on the wrong side of the body and medical instruments left inside the body after surgery, rose from 163 to 299 in just twelve months, the official statistics show.
From next month, NHS trusts will be ordered to publish quarterly lists detailing the number and type of all such errors, so that performance of different hospitals can be compared.
Doctors are instructed to record 25 types of incident which are so serious and avoidable that they should never occur.
Other blunders classed as "never events' include incorrect administration of insulin – which can kill – and misplaced feeding and breathing tubes, which mean a patient can drown on their own fluids.
The Department of Health said the figures had not doubled, because on top of the163 events reported centrally in 2011/12, further reports were made to other health authorities.
H/T
FoTM
