Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘nhs’

Petition Closed Prematurely

Earlier this year, I created a petition on the (then) government’s petition web site. The petition called for the government to fully implement the recommendations of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s Evidence Check on Homeopathy – basically calling on the government to stop wasting money on homeopathy.

The petition was due to be open for signatures for a year. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake as no matter who was in government, they would have made up their mind about the issue long before the petition closed.

But since the general election everything has changed. All of the petitions were closed to new signatures during the election campaign and they didn’t re-open once the new government was in place. Instead the web site explained that the new government was considering the best way to proceed with the site. The front page of the site now says:

With a new Government in place a review is taking place of online services, including e-petitions. We are committed to improving the e-petitions process and are looking at ways of ensuring that it functions as part of a cohesive approach to public debate and transparent government. A full announcement on how we plan to use these and other services across Government will be made as soon as this important work is completed.

It goes on to say:

Existing e-petitions, submitted to the previous administration, will not be carried forward to the new administration as part of this process. E-petitions that were live at the time of the election announcement on 6 April, when the e-petitions system was suspended, will therefore not be reopened for signatures. We are issuing responses to petitions that had exceeded the 500 signatures threshold as of 6 April 2010 and these can be viewed on the HMG e-petitions responses page.

So my petition has been closed. In the three or four months that it was open, over 1,600 people signed it. That means that we can expect some kind of response from the government, although it’s not there yet and there’s no indication of when we will receive it.

Thanks to everyone who signed the petition. Perhaps in this new cuts-driven regime removing finding for magic water on the NHS is an obvious way to save a few million quid.

NHS Money Wasted on Homeopathy

Don’t have time to go into the detail that it deserves, but the House of Commons science and technology committee has published the results of its evidence check on homeopathy. The results won’t, of course, come as any surprise to anyone who has been following the debate. But I have to admit to be impressed by the lack of ambiguity in their conclusions. This is paragraph 157:

By providing homeopathy on the NHS and allowing MHRA licensing of products which subsequently appear on pharmacy shelves, the Government runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine. To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy. Homeopathy should not be funded on the NHS and the MHRA should stop licensing homeopathic products.

Absolutely no equivocation there.

So what’s the next step? When to the homeopathic “hospitals” get closed down? When does the NHS get that money back for real medicine?

Update: The Woo-mongers in the House of Commons don’t plan to take this laying down. They’ve proposed an Early Day Motion criticising the committee’s report. Of course, only MPs with no grasp of science will be signing it. If your MP is on this list, then I suggest a strongly worded email might be in order.

NHS Waste

I haven’t written anything about my health recently, so let’s combine that with a little rant about NHS wastage.

The consultant is very happy with the way that the sarcoidosis is going and wants to slowly cut out my steroids. We’re doing this by taking 3mg a day for four weeks then 2mg a day and finally 1mg a day. This is compared to the 30mg a day I was on when the steroids were first prescribed.

I’m currently taking 1mg tablets and because prescriptions tend to be in four week blocks these tablets come in packets of 28. So I need 168 tablets – or six boxes.

We phoned my GP last week to get the prescription filled. My wife went in to pick it up. She noticed that the doctor had made up a prescription for 100 tablets – which isn’t enough. She went back to the doctor and pointed out the error. The doctor said she was happy to correct it and changed the prescription to 200 tablets. Rapidly losing the will to live my wife decided not to argue and just took the prescription.

So now I’ve got 200 tablets. That’s 32 more than I need. Almost 20% wasted. All because the doctor couldn’t be bothered to do some simple arithmetic. Actually she didn’t even need to do that. If she had just written the dosage instructions on the prescription, the pharmacist would have done the maths.

I needed six packets. I’ve got seven. And because 200 isn’t exactly divisible by 28, I’ve also got another little box containing four tablets cut out from another packet. I hope they can use the rest of that packet for other small amounts prescribed by doctors who can’t be bothered to give sensible prescriptions.

Oh, and because the prescription didn’t contain any dosage instructions, the boxes all have “take four tablets daily” written on them. Not sure where that came from. It’s a good job I’m clued up enough to remember what the consultant told me. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have forgotten that and just taken the pharmacist’s word.