There’s been complaints for decades about foreign born staff in the NHS having issues with communication in the English language. Some of these complaints that I have encountered from others in my life might have been low level grumbles about accents etc., but other complaints were a whole lot more serious. I’ve encountered too many ethnic British patients who’ve been put in the position of not being able to understand comments from medical staff about matters such as drug side effects or dosage because of the poor English of the medical practitioner.
Not having sufficient English to be able to talk to a Briton and to make themselves understood by that Briton is and has been a source of both annoyance and tragedies. The story below illustrates just how bad things can get when NHS staff not only cannot easily talk to Britons but can’t even communicate among themselves as their common language skills, which should be English, are clearly very much below par.
The more I read this story the more horrified I get.
I’m saddened but not at all surprised with this story. A failure to invest in training our own people for health service and healthcare roles and relying instead on importing staff from other nations, including the third world, where educational standards might be lower than ours and cultural standards considerably different from ours has helped to bring us to this terrible point. It’s a point where British people are dying in British hospitals because the staff could not communicate with other staff or, it appears, be able to read and understand basic drug data.
The NHS is not Britain’s proudest achievement, it’s an ongoing disaster of monstrous proportions. We deserve better and the original poster, whose post was allegedly censored by moderators on Reddit after just four hours, and his late father in particular deserved much better.