Post AhregpwRHEC8wGREWW by bioluminescently@disabled.social
(DIR) More posts by bioluminescently@disabled.social
(DIR) Post #AhregjQJVkvsitMUcK by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T19:47:14Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Re: that piece I boosted about the Lucy Letby case, I have to say I'm convinced.Consider the organisational, class and gender politics: this was a group of male consultants (senior doctors - didn't know before that that's a UK-specific term) who saw correlation between her presence and the deaths. On an understaffed unit, that could've applied by chance to any nurse. They had no evidence, just "vibes," if that: nobody criticised Letby's competence or attitude.1/-
(DIR) Post #AhregkMS1bR9dCYvEe by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T19:52:19Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
If you're reading this from outside the UK, some essential context you'll be missing is that nursing is simply not treated as an important profession here. Oh, we make a big fuss about our nurses: we stood on our doorsteps and applauded them, alongside other frontline staff, on Thursday nights at 8pm during the first COVID lockdowns.But the extent to which nursing is romanticised in the public imagination sits alongside an unpleasant and highly political truth.2/-
(DIR) Post #AhregmLSeFpjmi79yC by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T19:53:50Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
What we don't do is pay them enough money to either compensate them fairly for what they do, or persuade them to remain in the profession: even before COVID, people were leaving in droves what is still a mostly female profession. And nurses have been subject to endless shit-talk for literal decades for responding to the conditions in which they must work: nursing now involves more academic rigour and paperwork than it once did. They can do so much more. 3/-
(DIR) Post #AhregoF9afybfjB9Ps by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T19:58:35Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
For that, they've been subject to decades of misogynist tabloid smears about how nurses supposedly don't want to wipe bottoms any more. They are blamed for staffing issues that are really about underfunding and poor planning: politics, again. And the idea that we might want the people who dispense controlled medications, monitor and support patients, and do highly specialist procedures, to be LESS sophisticated and highly trained is arrant nonsense. 4/-
(DIR) Post #AhregpwRHEC8wGREWW by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:01:23Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
To be clear, many doctors, particularly junior doctors, are also underpaid and expected to work dangerously long hours. This both harms patient safety and outcomes and, once again, pushes people out of the profession - or else, like nurses, they continue in their profession, but leave the UK to work in countries where they will be more valued, less overworked, and more fairly compensated. 5/-
(DIR) Post #AhregrY3IrsNvD2mn2 by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:03:38Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
But, as a patient... it doesn't surprise me terribly that a group of consultants got together and decided a nurse (whom they, once again, had no proof against) was to blame. We're told that there was a culture on the ward of both nurses and doctors coming to work sick (this, in my experience, is NHS-typical), coughing and sneezing and then putting their hands inside incubators without washing them first (this, in my experience, is atypical and shocking). 6/-
(DIR) Post #AhregtB5FEgwyYJTGa by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:06:13Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Britain is a country, and medicine a profession, that loves a scapegoat. In rigidly hierarchical institutions like the NHS, it is not unknown for failings of care to roll downhill until someone relatively lacking in political and institutional privilege starts to look like the problem. Everything you're told about that unit - and wider neonatal care in England - indicates a system under vast strain and with shit morale. Something was going to give. 7/-
(DIR) Post #Ahregupt50vQ7OPZVQ by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:08:02Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
And the point I'm trying to make here is that Lucy Letby could be the murderer we've all been told she is - I do not know and cannot prove it one way or the other - but whether or not that is the case, a catalogue of very dangerous failings was going on in that unit as routine practice: understaffing, exposing very sick and vulnerable babies to infectious staff, equipment shortages, inadequate space for infection control. 8/-
(DIR) Post #Ahregw7eISj86ljGpU by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:09:58Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I'm angry about it because we should all be angry when children die and especially when they die what may well have been avoidable deaths. But I'm also angry because I'm intimately aware that when I die, there's a significant chance that it will be on another highly specialised but painfully understaffed, under-resourced ward where morale is low and systemic inequalities impact on daily practice in ways they should not. That's true for many disabled people. 9/-
(DIR) Post #AhregxLrj5h1v9O8cy by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:13:21Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I think many of us, as disabled people, read into this case what the court and the media told us to, what the wider public read into it, and also what our lives lived in the context of medical ableism and abuse had taught us to read into it: that medical error and iatrogenic harm are common, that a significant number of hospital staff are not as competent as they ought to be, and of those, a small but scary proportion wilfully harm the most vulnerable patients.10/-
(DIR) Post #AhregyVTQqyNVEtKF6 by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:20:43Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
The story of the children who died and of Lucy Letby is therefore intensely political for an awful lot of people who fear what it may mean for them in the future, or who have already been harmed: parents and parents-to-be of neonates, disabled people (of whom some have disabilities deriving from premature birth), nurses and doctors.That's why it's important that we question whether the obvious story is the truth, or the whole truth. 11/-
(DIR) Post #AhregzpiV4l9cJN0Qy by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:25:35Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
And what we're seeing described in that article is not a rigourous investigation with high standards of evidence, but a witch hunt. It's been proven that doctors are subject to confirmation bias, but how much moreso are the police? We see how almost as soon as the matter was reported to police, investigators whose specialism was in the medical murder/serial killer line fell over themselves to get involved. There was a ghoulish urge to make the case fit assumptions. 12/-
(DIR) Post #Ahreh1EZIAETxg0MoC by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:30:02Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
When all you have is a hammer, things have a way of looking like nails. The other thing you need to understand is that the Tories have been trying to destroy the NHS for a long time. We are a country mired in industrial action by doctors and nurses, and a government that applauded our clinical staff when it looked good to do so politically at the height of COVID more generally takes every chance it gets to politically smear those same clinical staff. 13/-
(DIR) Post #Ahreh2NT2YwfVZAzJo by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:33:07Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
This is because they have been pursuing privatisation of the service both openly and by steal for many years. Bits of its functioning have already been sold off to US firms that do not have our interests at heart. Some Americans will warn, "You have to stop them!" Please understand: we tend to hear a lot more personal detail about your healthcare than you do about ours (there are more of you), and we've been trying to stop them for a very long time. 14/-
(DIR) Post #Ahreh3WMmxer3SLbpQ by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:35:41Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
In this context of privatisation, it has been very noticeable how the Tories and the largely right-wing media in the UK have pursued an agenda of blaming NHS staff, administrators and managers at every turn for patients' bad experiences. To be clear, there have been many occasions when blame was deserved, but that doesn't detract from an overall context in which powerful people would rather whip up hatred of Letby than ask why her ward was so unsafe overall. 15/-
(DIR) Post #Ahreh4pBwSJJ68A9oG by bioluminescently@disabled.social
2024-05-13T20:41:15Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
So my point here isn't to definitively state Letby's innocence, because I can't. My point is to illustrate that there is more than reasonable doubt about her guilt, and to highlight the politics of gender, medical hierarchy and economics that must inform any proper understanding of nursing and therefore her case. And again, I speak as a patient. An NHS whose failings might have hidden a killer is still more likely to kill you through negligence or neglect.16/16