THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Scandalous misuse of hospital beds

Scandalous misuse of hospital beds

One would think that giving the "blockers" absolute priority to welfare housing would be an obvious step forward. But bureaucracy could thwart even that. Why does each client have to have a bureaucratic "plan"? Getting them into accomodations should be a first step, not a last step. Planning is all very well but when it leads to months of waste of precious resources it is idiocy. But idiocy is to be expected of Left and centrist governments

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has launched an ambitious bid to free disabled people waiting an average of five months in hospital despite being medically ready for discharge, taking up more than a thousand sick beds unnecessarily and costing taxpayers up to $1bn each year.

Mr Shorten has challenged his agency to respond to disabled people within four days once alerted that they were ready to be discharged from hospital.

He also revealed plans to hire more NDIS staff to be stationed in hospitals and giving them the authority to make faster “on the spot” decisions to fast-track discharges.

Currently, NDIS participants are waiting 160 days on average for the National Disability Insurance Agency to get them out of hospitals, even though they have been deemed fit to leave.

Mr Shorten pointed to possible reasons behind the delays including bureaucracy or lack of appropriate accommodation.

The Australian has obtained exclusive details of the proposed Hospital Discharge Operational Plan, which shows that, of the 2328 NDIS participants in hospital, 1384 were medically ready for discharge.

Mr Shorten said the current wait times were “unacceptable” and costing the hospital system up to $3m a day. “If there’s 1500 people on average every night in Australia in a hospital when they could be in medium term or long-term accommodation elsewhere, if each person is costing north of $2000 a night for care that means every night in Australia $3m ticks over,” he said.

Of those NDIS participants ready for discharge, 451 were in NSW, 276 in Victoria, 258 in Queensland and 177 in WA. Most, or 735, had an NDIS interim plan while the other 649 were yet to receive one.

The Hospital Discharge plan is aimed at pressuring the NDIS into improving outcomes for disabled Australians, with Mr Shorten and his state counterparts setting a number of targets to fast-track the transfer of NDIS participants out of hospitals.

The targets include contacting a participant within four days of the agency being made aware they are medically fit to be discharged and getting their NDIS plan in place within 30 days, down from the current average of 80 days.

Mr Shorten said the targets and accompanying reporting framework would help reveal what was causing the long discharge delays.

“We’re going to set some goals,” he said. “Whether they’re realistic or not remains to be seen. These goals, to use a metaphor, are like a dye you might put in an MRI scan. I’m not saying we’ll achieve this overnight, or even in a year, but let’s find out where the obstacles are.

“Is it clunky bureaucracy? Is it a lack of long-term accommodation? Is it a lack of paid care and support teams within the community? Is it poor communication between hospitals and other departments? It could be all of the above, but let’s find out.”

Mr Shorten said the reporting framework, which would measure outcomes against the new targets, was about “keeping the system honest”.

“This data is not about blaming the states or feds, let’s just deal with the truth,” he said.

“The truth will show us what we’re not doing right.”

The operational plan would increase the number of Health Liaison Officers – which are NDIS staff offered to hospitals to assist their discharge teams – by more than 20 per cent by the end of September.

This will increase the number of HLOs from 33 to 40, with the aim of growing the pool of such staff over time.

NDIS hospital teams will also receive additional training and the authority to make decisions about home and living plan variations for participants on the spot.

Mr Shorten said the plan and its bold targets were intended to push the agency.

“I’ve challenged the agency to explain why we can’t achieve these standards,” he said.

“There may be good reasons but I want to understand why. It’s not good enough to shrug our shoulders and say ‘too hard’.”

Work is also being done between the Commonwealth and the states to ensure that, where a participant is not eligible for specialist disability accommodation, timely access to social housing can be sourced.

Mr Shorten said that while he believed there were vacancies in disability accommodation in some areas, he was worried that in places such as Tasmania and regional Australia the stock of places was “insufficient”.

Mr Shorten said the plan was aimed at improving good will not only between Australians with disabilities and the agency, but between the Commonwealth and states as well.

However, he maintained states and territories needed to do more in supporting disabled Australians. “I still think states aren’t paying enough towards NDIS,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/ndis-minister-bill-shorten-bid-to-free-up-sickbeds/news-story/0e596d9a0069df04d66c087ae1b3fa74

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Scandalous misuse of hospital beds

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