Boris Johnson refuses to look at photo of child on hospital floor

[Cam77]

Johnson repeatedly refusing to look at picture of a four year old child on a hospital floor when confronted by an ITV reporter. After refusing to so much as glance at the photo, he then proceeds to pocket the reporters phone(!?) while mouthing empty platitudes. Here’s a link,but I’m sure you’ll see it on the news anyway..
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-nhs-leeds-hospital-floor-jack-williment-phone-photo-a9239041.html
Was he having a bad day? Nah, it’s Johnson to a T: a privileged, uncaring, unashamed bullshitter, out for number one. Does this man represent our country?

This thread makes really sobering reading g. Someone should make Boris read it. Where on earth does all the money go that the govt keep telling us they are giving to the NHS.
Also the best doctors are always those from overseas. I saw a specialist yesterday who was Spanish. Streets ahead of doctors trained here.

I spent days waiting for tests, surgery and was then after a ludicrous wait for pharmacy, couldn't get a porter to take me down to the exit and after an hour, I gave up and walked down myself. I'm not angry with the hospital at all, I'm angry with the fact there aren't enough doctors, nurses, beds and support workers

We look at it differently

The majority of the problem we think lies with the fundamental system.

Fix the system and then see if we need more nurses doctors and beds and money

Dp has been ill for the last 3 years and in and out of hospital (probably about 9 months actually in hospital) over the last 3 years so we have seen first hand how the system works.

From our experience and everyone we know the system has been operating like this for decades.

There are 2 things going on and they both stem back to the initial appointment with your gp.

If you go to the doctors with anything more than one symptom or anything that needs a referral to a specialist you end up going back again and sometimes again or sometimes so many times you lose count of the number of appointments.

Each of those appointments costs the NHS money and blocks an appointment for someone new coming into the system.

A lot of people know exactly what is wrong with them so if the doctor actually listened they would send them for that test immediately. Or send them for every test they needed straight away and either things get sorted or referred on to a specialist.

I wonder how easy it would be to get an appointment at your gps surgery if you cut out the people who had to go back time and time again for the same problem.

Dd was in hospital with gastritis a couple of years ago.

Every woman on that ward knew exactly what they had wrong but it took doctors in most cases months to finally send them for the relevant tests by which time a small problem had turned into a larger problem that needed in one woman’s case major life changing surgery instead of if the doctor had listened to her at her initial appointment it would have been a simple operatio.
She wouldn’t have taken up a bed for several weeks needing permanent NHS involvement for the rest of her life and both her and her husband would have continued in their jobs paying into the NHS. Rather than 2 people having to give up work and draining funds by having to claim disability and caters allowance

Every other woman on that ward was in for longer than they should have been because of doctors not listening

Dd had gastritis. I had gastritis years ago. I knew the symptoms.
Dd asked to be tested for gastritis first but instead they tested her for it after they had tested for everything else.

It took 3 days of not only Dd being in agony but 3 days in a hospital bed for something that just needed a prescription

Dp went multiple times to the doctors questioning if he had bowel cancer. His Df died of bowel cancer and he knew the symptoms.

He got so unwell that I had to help him into A&E as he couldn’t walk unaided.
2 days after an appointment where he was told not to frighten himself with dr Google and being given yet another prescription for laxatives.

Bowel cancer if caught early is quite a small operation and a minimal amount of time in hospital

Instead after many many gps appointments he ended up spending 9 weeks in hospital initially (we added up 9 months over the last 3 years.)

If the gp had tested him or referred him in the first place how many people waiting for a bed could have been treated in those 9 months he took up a bed

OTOH friend who lives in a European country fell ill.

She was worried about the bill she would have to pay but she had to see a doctor.

He sent her for blood tests.

there were 40 pages of blood test results.

He made his diagnosis and she was well again within the week.

Cost was under €300

If that was the NHS she would have been treated for one symptom at a time had multiple doctors appointments, sent for multiple blood tests and probably ended up in hospital taking up a bed for a few weeks.

This is why the NHS is in trouble.

It is trouble of their own making.
In trying to save a £100 by fobbing people off they are ending up wasting a £1000

Thanks for the link, @Owlsintowels, but I still don't know who to believe. It seems a choice between Corbyn, who wants to renationalise railways and had a convenient photog who travelled the train to "research" the story he wanted - or Branson, who wants trains to remain private so may equally spin the story to suit

So I'm still keeping an open mind on that one ... but if I refer to it in future I'll be careful to write "alleged such-and-such"

Interesting to see the silly posts linked from Twitter though, with a "script" being parroted by various folk who all claim it for their own

Not unlike Mumsnet at times ...

Under Blair’s watch, my local maternity hospital was shut and his 1999 reforms started the sell off, off the NHS.

@Oliversmumsarmy
What if you don’t have that£300?
We all know the NHS costs the taxpayer but is free at the point of NEED for everyone regardless of their income.

You seem to have also overlooked or omitted the Savage Conservative a White Paper which made radical changes to GPS in the healthcare landscape. They could no longer hand out pills like sweeties and make referrals without consideration of budgets. Not that al did but PCTs turned the lights out and left balance books for them. The seismic change espoused the lack of and interest in robust commissioning and the ocean liner is still turning.

I think it would be interesting to have a locality based GP at the nerve centre service actually co located with day surgery, a & e etc if you think the immediate issue is referred to treatment time. That is why they brought in the 18 week wait. However that would still create capacity issues

Yes it is a systematic fault if money is not spent on areas most in need and but frankly if anyone thinks the Conservatives will do what they say they will in terms of investment then I think they need an assessment of their own. It is also unfair to suggest that managers are to blame. They have thankless tasks and are continually faved with hitting targets over delivering actual care.

Not only will there be a significant skills gap if foreign professionals leave we also have a serious gap in terms of qualified clinicians and medics coming through the system thanks to the Tory disregard for nurse bursary training

And in top of that we have the nightmare that is social care and so interlinked to secondary and primary care.

Let’s not forget the paramedic workforce and the need for more of them to be prescribers to perform prescribe and treat as well as the co terminology problems

It is all a mess but it is easy to blame the system rather than those at the helm

www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/10/woman-says-account-hacked-to-post-fake-story-about-hospital-boy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR2DBtk_lnVJVhA4abEwry0NDe8Od7eLnv1C8VYWUGv46hQBXY2EyYFDDMo

I was hacked,' says woman whose account claimed hospital boy photo was staged
Woman denies posting false information that photo of four-year-old was political stunt

Charlet/AFP via Getty Images
A medical secretary has claimed her Facebook account was hacked after it was used to post false information claiming that a photograph of an ill boy on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was staged for political purposes.

The woman denied posting the allegation that four-year-old Jack Willment-Barr’s mother placed him on the floor specifically to take the picture which became symbolic of the NHS’s troubles after it appeared on the front page of Monday’s Daily Mirror.

“I was hacked. I am not a nurse and I certainly don’t know anyone in Leeds,” said the woman, whose name the Guardian is withholding because she says she has received death threats. “I’ve had to delete everything as I have had death threats to myself and my children.”

The original viral post on the medical secretary’s Facebook account said “I am a nurse myself” and cited a “good friend of mine” at Leeds General

It claimed the boy in the photo “was in fact put there by his mother who then took photos on her mobile phone and then uploaded it to media outlets”. The post dismissed the pictures of the ill boy as “another Momentum propaganda story”, despite the fact the hospital had already apologised for his treatment.

She said she had tried to report the hack of her Facebook account to the advice service Action Fraud, although this claim could not be verified.

Claims that the photo was staged spread rapidly across social media and messaging services on Monday night, potentially reaching millions of people after being amplified by Conservative politicians, celebrities and some journalists.

The row over Jack’s treatment has become a central part of the election campaign, with Boris Johnson being criticised for repeatedly refusing to look at the photograph he was shown by a journalist during an interview on Monday.

Despite the claim that the photo was staged having been acknowledged as false, it has continued to spread on both Facebook and Twitter, largely through individual low-follower accounts cutting and pasting the original text to share with their friends.

One version, posted by a man who claims to work for the British army’s intelligence corps, has received 2,000 shares on Facebook; another, from a person saying they were a former soldier, has received a further 500.

The same claim was shared on Twitter, where it was spread by much more significant accounts. The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson retweeted screenshots of the Facebook page to her followers twice, telling them “I presume this is genuine”, and adding later that the photo was “100% faked”. Her posts have received thousands of retweets between them.

According to the researcher Marc Owen Jones, Pearson is “perhaps the most influential proponent of the faked floor theory”, although a tweet from the former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen sent to Piers Morgan may have been seen by more people as a one-off.

While many of the users who initially posted the claims to Twitter shared it with identical wording, there is little indication that the false narrative is being artificially boosted by automated accounts.

Twitter metadata shows the vast majority of the tweets were posted through the social network’s website or smartphone apps, and the accounts sharing them overwhelmingly appear to be those of real people with an interest in politics.

Despite claims of a staged photo, Leeds General Infirmary has confirmed that Jack did suffer due to an exceptionally busy week

Our hospitals are extremely busy at the moment and we are very sorry that Jack’s family had a long wait in our emergency department,” said Dr Yvette Oade, the chief medical officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS trust.

“We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed. This falls below our usual high standards, and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.

OH...................

Rebecca
@Rebecca47653788
Replying to
@RWFRITTE

@GWR1970
and 3 others
She does exist 😁 she isn't a registered nurse though, she's a PA for her GP husband. Oddly enough I've just found her son's FB - she's deleted her account - and guess who he's "friends" with? Matt Hancock.....🤔

twitter.com/Rebecca47653788/status/1204333607109705733?s=20

THIS STINKS!

according to facebook I follow Corbin - I read some of his page & criticize some items & Hancock is very active on the internet/email etc if you read some of his stuff just to criticize him you might well become a "friend" so you can comment or share & criticize his utterances too. So here a thing -don't assume anything - as I said before - if Hancock had to dash up to the hospital & say what he did it confirms this actually happened. The false story reminds me of USA when a young kid with guns killed many children & some people who believed in gun rights spread stories that this hadn't happened & many families & children where threatened. We need to be aware - cross check - & recognise that you need to check your sources - facebook etc is not a provable source.

Thats funny. Because i often comment on pages i dont follow and it doesnt register me as following them.

What if you don’t have that£300?
We all know the NHS costs the taxpayer but is free at the point of NEED for everyone regardless of their income

Yes the NHS is free for everyone but this free service in dps case spent so long farting about and refusing to refer him that it cost them more in the long run and doesn’t run to actually doing anything more than an initial operation.

The operation he needed to buy more time was refused.
So we are in the position of having had to pay for a major operation and all his cancer treatment.

So please stop saying the NHS is free.

I would rather it had been a paid service and we had to pay for what would have been a relatively minor operation but he had immediately been referred to a specialist than what we have been left with.

What would happen if we didn’t have the money

He would have died.

What would have happened if we had relied solely on the NHS

He would have died

Dp is now in a position of paying for a service that won’t treat him.

Unless he wants to die then they will treat him

Maybe there would be more money and more beds around if the whole system was run properly and you could get referred immediately

OTOH I don’t believe that the nursing shortage has anything to do with the conservative government.
My friend was a nurse.
Started working as a nurse at 16

Under the Labour government she was made redundant along with loads of other home grown nursing staff probably because they had become too expensive.

Obviously their jobs didn’t go. The hospital still has nurses but now it is ones they can get away with paying a pittance to.

Fwiw. Friend who lives in a European country was ill because of NHS prognosis and treatment.

@HelenDove its not just commenting its sharing as well -& bully for you! I noted someone previously made a daft excuse for Boris not reading or seeing properly because he might as his age have become longsighted. If as an older person who HAS developed longsighted as they age -what you will see people do it hold the item with written etc info further away to focus or if shortsighted you do the one eyed up to the eyeball cross eyed focus.

No one ends up on my list of fb friends unless i friend request them and they accept or vice versa.

www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/health/do-not-believe-a-stranger-on-social-media-who-disappears-into-the-night-an-open-letter-from-our-editor-to-you-1-10147697

thank you Helena

The Yorkshire Post, last remaining bastion of journalistic integrity.

twitter.com/yorkshirepost/status/1204521950946701312?s=20

@bellinisurge I'm already in my 50s, and so is my husband. I am near sighted, so don't need reading glasses, but my husband wears reading glasses.

I mentioned Bojo's age in relation to his eyesight, as many people in their 50s need glasses for reading and indeed to see tiny photos on a phone clearly. I wasn't being ageist or saying that his age excused him from handling this situation poorly, I was just theorising about one reason why he may have been reluctant to look at the photo.

Bojo is not the most empathetic person, but the way people are banging on about this you'd think that he'd ripped a baby's head off! Like I said before, any PM is just a flawed human being, not an omnipotent, omnipresent God, so it's ridiculous to hold the PM responsible for every single bad thing that happens in this country. But no one has responded to this point, as they are too busy trying to paint Bojo as the most evil monster that ever lived. It's so illogical. Surely rational people would agree that most human beings have a mix of good and bad traits in them? I may dislike certain politicians, but I don't see them as evil personified.

they are too busy trying to paint Bojo as the most evil monster that ever lived

Aye right, ma wee bot

I'm no bot, but feel free to use that line on anyone who disagrees with your view.

Unfortunately the winter months can be the busiest for hospitals. When I worked for the NHS at well known city hospital we had a flu epidemic and there were so many death we ran out of space at the mortuary and we had to hire a chiller lorry to store the bodies in ... this is true I'm afraid.

Being responsible for everything that happens in this country (particularly within the public sector) is literally the PMs job.

And his ineptitude and lack of compassion should worry you.

Not to mention his vanity, if he won't wear glasses when he needs them...