Fining hospitals

[Dixy]

Fining a hospital for any failure is just bizarre.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-43842...
The guberment effectively funds the NHS and collects the fine so they take the money out of one pocket and put it in another.
The trust may be making poor decisions around inadequate budgets or just be incompetent, why do heads never roll or the chief executives get fined personally.

[Dixy]

Ridgemont said:

To the OP: what’s the alternative? Just shrugging and a mild ‘nevermind’? People died because of incompetence.

The hospital was not incompetent, a person or people were, they should be the ones being penalised, and if they have resigned or retired they should still be called to account.

[Dixy]

DurianIceCream said:

Exactly this. It is almost never the fault of a single person when things go wrong. If an individual person can make a mistake and things go seriously wrong, then the fault does not lie with the person making the mistake, for all people make mistakes. The fault lies in the organisational procedure whereby a mistake can have serious consequences.

If people want to start punishing employees for making mistakes then this will happen:
- you will make a mistake yourself, so you will be punished
- nobody will do anything because it would create extreme risk adversion
- mistakes will be hidden because of fear of punishment instead of brought out in the open for the benefit of everyone, to make improvement without assigning blame

You do realise this is the NHS we are talking about, this is what happens to clinicians on a regular basis. Funny how it does not seem to happen to the managers.