…just not individually…
From BBC, which focuses an unflinching eye on the reality of socialized medicine, and the astonishing weirdness within and without (though I should say that the eye sees without seeing…)
Nurses to be rated on compassion
Nurses are to be rated according to the levels of care and empathy they give to patients under government plans.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson told the Guardian newspaper that he wants the performance of every nursing team in England to be scored.
He said he believes compassionate care was as crucial to the recovery of patients as the skills of surgeons.
Nurse leaders welcomed the move and said they would work with ministers on developing the system.
…
But he ruled out rating individual nurses and also said it would not affect pay.
Group compassion? What the heck are they even pretending to measure?
The last sentence of the article mentions it’ll be very difficult to measure, which is of course correct. Maybe they could devise a compassion scale, using a visual aid showing a group of uncaring nurses down at 1 and compassionate-looking nurses at 10.
Holy crap – good thing they don’t rate surgeons based on group empathy. The UK is notorious for useless stats in the healthcare group. When I did research on their 4 hour ER wait time mandate I couldn’t believe the number of useless numbers they come up with. It must cost a fortune just to create the measurements. If the empathy test had to be used in medicine what would the sensitivity/specificity be (to ID an unempathetic team)? 50/50?
http://www.waittimes.blogspot.com
In my ER, compassion is a function of how many inappropriate controlled substances were prescribed and the level of resistance in obtaining said substances.
That’s what government-run, single payer systems do. Nurse K, of course, is dead on.