Court proceedings across the UK are shining a light on the negative effects of government-run health care. The whole system of conditioned medicine is in the dock, despite the fact that the trial involves just one nurse at the time.
Lucy Letby, who worked for Britain’s National Health Service ( NHS) in a neonatal intensive care unit, is being retried for the attempted murder of one of her patients. A jury found Letby guilty of murdering seven children and trying to murder six others last year, while also acquitting her of two killings and deadlocking her with the death of four babies.
Letby is a part of one of the horrible deaths Letby is associated with, but we may not be aware of the specifics behind them. But regardless of whether she was to blame for some, or few, of the youngsters who passed, it’s pretty obvious what is to blame for all of them: Britain’s National Health Service.
Scenario 1: Bureaucracy Enabled a Criminal
Statements made prior to the most current test reveal an NHS society that seems more focused on maintaining its popularity than ensuring that patients were protected from a potential crime on their team.
For instance, Letby reacted by submitting a taunting complaint against the doctors in late 2016 when medical staff expressed concern about the nurse being the cause of many individual deaths. In early 2017, the doctor pressed two doctors to create an apology to her and pressured them to do so.
At the current test, a doctor who was forced to forgive to Letby testified that when he attempted to raise questions,” we were directly told at that point it was the wrong point to contact the police because it would be terrible for the popularity of the trust and there would be blue and white tape outside.”
This doctor, who tried but failed to raise the alarm, said that “it’s a matter of infinite regret I did n’t handle it differently” and that the deaths of the children are “going to be in my nightmares forever”. The higher ups, however, are actually at fault, because they were more concerned with” the reputation of the trust” than with the possibility that one of their own staff members was purposefully killing patients.
In February 2016, Britain’s Care Quality Commission audited the hospital and said the pediatric wing needed safety improvements. However, the commission claimed to The Wall Street Journal that the agency had not been informed of the rise in newborn baby deaths during its review.
Then, in response to the publicity surrounding the Letby case, a group of NHS whistleblowers has claimed that the entire service is a product of” a culture detrimental to patient safety.”
Scenario 2: A Flawed System Nurse as the Scapegoat
A lengthy feature article from The New Yorker in May, on the other hand, held a contradictory view: that Letby has been cast as a victim of a number of terrible coincidences. The narrative posits that Letby’s assertions that the general public saw as an admission of crimes were actually the product of a nurse wracked by guilt that she could n’t care for her patients properly. The New Yorker provides numerous instances of subpar and under-resourced care provided by the hospital in question in doing so.
For instance, a member of the Letby’s unit’s nurses acknowledged that” we had massive staffing issues” with people being asked to work longer shifts. This was the same conclusion a Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health team made. Then there’s this:
A newborn’s death occurred in 2014, one year before the deaths for which Letby was accused, and an inquest determined that doctors had inserted a breathing tube into the baby’s esophagus rather than his trachea despite numerous indications that the tube had been misplaced. ” I find it surprising these signs were not realised”, the coroner said, according to the Daily Express. The boy’s mother claimed that because of staff shortages, blood tests and X-rays were unavailable for seven hours while a doctor was on duty, working between the children’s and neonatal wards.
A baby delivered via C- section,” a girl who was dusky and limp when she was born, should have been treated with antibiotics immediately, doctors later acknowledged, but nearly four hours passed before she was given the medication. … The baby continued to deteriorate throughout the]next ] night and could not be revived”.
One law professor claimed Letby had been turned into a “fall girl” for the NHS’s wider failings,  ,  ,  , despite these instances of substandard care, many of which have nothing to do with her.
This is what the police excel at, looking for a responsible person. Finding a systemic issue in an organization like the National Health Service, where overworked people are cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category, is not within the police’s purview. It is much more satisfying to report that a criminal or a bad person was involved than to have to deal with the outcome of government policy.
The fact remains, however, that government policy lies at the heart of the Lucy Letby case.
Problem of Government Control
The families of the deceased children have searched unsuccessfully for answers and explanations regarding their children’s deaths for nearly a decade. Whether Letby committed the crimes as alleged matters a great deal to them. However, when it comes to more serious issues with Britain’s NHS, the question of whether Letby actually murdered her patients seems a little out of the question. According to James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal,” Either the government bureaucracy enabled the killer or the government bureaucracy is the killer” (emphasis original ).
The issue with government-run health care is that it prioritizes politics over patients. The Lucy Letby case illustrates the result of politicians ‘ efforts to impose administrative control and a bureaucratic culture with little accountability in an NHS that is more focused on saving faces than patients.
So, remember Lucy Letby and the children who died in her care the next time Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or any of his colleagues make claims about socialized medicine benefiting patients.
