{"id":35380,"date":"2015-10-05T12:42:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T11:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=35380"},"modified":"2015-10-05T12:43:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T11:43:04","slug":"the-bmj-today-when-is-humane-discretion-in-the-nhs-an-offence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2015\/10\/05\/the-bmj-today-when-is-humane-discretion-in-the-nhs-an-offence\/","title":{"rendered":"The BMJ Today: When is humane discretion in the NHS an offence?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jeremy_hunt_again\"<\/a>\u2022 <\/strong>While Jeremy Hunt prepares to tell the Tory party conference about his plans for a seven day NHS, one doctor suggests there are more immediate problems that he should address, namely overcrowding in today\u2019s hospitals<\/a>. David Oliver, consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine, Berkshire, says: \u201cI have a confession: I sometimes allow patients to stay an extra day or three in hospital, even when they\u2019re technically stable enough to leave. Yes: I know that it\u2019s bad. England has relatively few acute beds. We\u2019ve lost them rapidly, while emergency admissions and delayed transfers have risen inexorably.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says the problem is overcrowding, and overcrowding hurts: \u201cHospitals become less efficient and safe when bed occupancy is high.\u201d He asks if he was wrong \u201cto exercise some humane discretion\u201d and confesses he is unrepentant.<\/p>\n

\"Kadcyla2\"<\/a>\u2022 <\/strong>Elsewhere in The BMJ<\/em>, Zosia Kmietowicz tells of attempts by a pressure group to make the expensive breast cancer drug Kadcyla<\/a> (also known as T-DM1) available to NHS patients. The Coalition for Affordable T-DM1, a group of patients with cancer, doctors, and patient advocates, has called on the health secretary Jeremy Hunt to scrap its patent and allow a generic version to be made. The Cancer Drugs Fund has delisted the drug, which is marketed by Roche and costs \u00a390 000 per patient for a possible extra six months of life. The group says that the \u201cCrown use\u201d provisions of the Patents Act 1977 could be invoked to allow other companies to make a generic version.<\/p>\n

\"msf_afghanistan\"<\/a>\u2022 <\/strong>This weekend, Afghanistan witnessed yet another tragedy. US airplanes bombed a hospital in Kunduz, run by the charity M\u00e9decins sans Fronti\u00e8res, killing 12 staff and 10 patients. Adrian O\u2019Dowd recounts the horrors of the event in his news story<\/a>. He quotes from an eye witness account given by one of the MSF nurses, Lajos Zoltan Jecs, who was in the hospital at the time of the attacks. Jecs said: \u201cIt was absolutely terrifying. What we saw was the hospital destroyed, burning. Enough staff had survived, so we could help the wounded with treatable wounds. But there were too many [staff and patients] that we couldn\u2019t help. These [staff] are people who had been working hard for months, non-stop for the past week. They had not gone home, they had not seen their families, they had just been working in the hospital to help people . . . and now they are dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Annabel Ferriman<\/strong>, senior news editor, <\/em>The BMJ.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 While Jeremy Hunt prepares to tell the Tory party conference about his plans for a seven day NHS, one doctor suggests there are more immediate problems that he should address, namely overcrowding in today\u2019s hospitals. David Oliver, consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine, Berkshire, says: \u201cI have a confession: I sometimes allow patients […]<\/p>\n

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