Britain’s socialized health service is exposing patients to excessive radiation with out-of-date radiology machines. A National Health Service (NHS) trust covering nearly half a million people in Kent, England, has been using machines that expired up to four years ago.
“Until this equipment is replaced we cannot easily reduce the dose to patients,” trust board papers state. Parts failures in the old machines result in lengthy, unreliable scans at “the upper limit of safe” in terms of patient irradiation.
Forty-eight percent of NHS trusts use CT and MRI scanners beyond their recommended ten-year life span. The socialized health service, which politicians have often portrayed as “the envy of the world,” also has the fewest CT and MRI scanners per head of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country.
In early March, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, the second-most senior politician in the United Kingdom, claimed “[t]he NHS is, rightly, the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British.”
Days later it was reported that just one NHS hospital had amputated the limbs of at least six people in error, with over a hundred similar botch jobs reported across the country over just three years.
show less
