Dr No’s mother has been admitted to hospital – at home. This NHS wheeze is a worthy idea, which Dr No supports. On paper, it is win-win: patients stay in their beloved homes, and the NHS saves money. In practice, it has one minor but fatal flaw. The hospital has a matron, kit in abundance, OTs, you name it, but no ward nurses. It is a hospital without nurses on its wards, and like all hospitals without nurses on the wards, it doesn’t work. Ironically, the money saved by not admitting patients to real hospitals could fund these nurses, but no one in the NHS has spotted this, and so the idea remains worthy, but doomed to fail. One supposes that were Crippen still blogging, he would have done hospital at home full justice, as he once did for another NHS corker, the hospital at night, a hospital whose defining characteristic was not an absence of nurses – rather the opposite in fact – but an absence of doctors.
