Strangled With Red Tape Outside Socialist Hospital

Moonbattery reports:

If you’re going to have an asthma attack, be sure not to do it in front of a hospital — at least not in a country with socialized medicine. Once again Britain lights to the way into our bleak collectivist future:

A student lay dying from an asthma attack outside a hospital after A&E [accident &emergency] staff refused to summon help, telling her friend to ring for an ambulance instead.
Melody Davis, 20, had been driven to casualty but her friends got stuck behind a barrier to a staff car park.
One of Miss Davis’s friends ran 150 yards into the A&E department and asked a receptionist to summon help.
She was told she would have to dial 999 for an ambulance if she wanted emergency treatment.
The staff member refused to place the call and told the friend to use a phone in the reception area.

Rules are rules. The all-pervasive bureaucracy implicit in socialism reduces people to automatons who exist to obey them, oblivious to common sense.

By the time she returned to the car several minutes later, the Liverpool University student had collapsed and another friend was trying to resuscitate her.

Eventually the proper forms must have been filled out and the mandatory protocol complied with, because Miss Davis was finally taken into the hospital, where she died free of charge, compliments of socialized medicine.




To be fair,This death-by-policy- also happens in the USA:

PORTLAND – An injured man who had just crashed his car in a hospital parking lot was forced to wait for an ambulance because of hospital procedure, Portland police said.

Investigators said 61-year-old Birgilio Marin-Fuentes died afterward from cardiac complications.
An officer who had been investigating a possible DUII near Portland Adventist Hospital was flagged down early Thursday morning by someone who had just witnessed the crash.
The witness told the officer a man had just crashed his car into a light pole in the hospital parking lot, according to Sgt. Pete Simpson.
The officer responded to the crash scene and found Marin-Fuentes unresponsive. Simpson said the driver had apparently suffered a medical condition not associated with the crash.
Adventist spokeswoman Judy Lindsay Leach said the charge nurse directed a paramedic to go immediately to the scene, then dispatched first responders.
The crash was approximately 100 yards from the hospital, but the victim could not be processed without following standard ambulance protocol.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41521922/?gt1=43001


If this behaviour starts becoming all the more common and accepted - perhaps some of those hospital receptionists could be replaced by a computer interface.  Machines are better at following protocol and rules and if that is all that is going to be expected of these people, perhaps money could be saved by using machines instead of having to pay people who behave like machines. At least no one will have to pay for counseling for these things when their inability to deviate from protocol results in a death.

It isn't like there wouldn't be humans around to help out, but it might help the hospital workers feel even less responsible if they had a machine they could wheel out on to tell people that their loved one is just going to have to call an ambulance from the hospital parking lot if they don't want to die - "it is policy". Maybe one day some union will demand it.

Anyhow, getting serious here:

I wonder if these cases ever result in punishment for the receptionist. I shall have to look into that, but one would think that they would not be punished if they adhered to the rules and policy of their hospital.

If so then this is a moral hazard of a sort, is it not?  It reminds me of some of the conclusions made after the Milgram experiments, particular insofar as obedience and responsibility are concerned.  Whereas in those experiments responsibility was - in the eyes of the subject - assumed by the experimenter, in this case responsibility is probably seen by the hospital workers to be assumed by policy and protocol.  They simply may not view themselves as responsible for anything else other than obeying the rules and obeying protocol. 

"the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow" - The Milgram Experiment:   A lesson in depravity, the power of authority, and peer pressure