|
Walking with Oxygen Campaign - Living life with Oxygen
|
|
|
The Home Oxygen Service appears to have started out as a worthy plan to enhance the lives of people on Oxygen. Unfortunately some of the advantages of the existing system that had worked well for many years appear to have been overlooked. To privatise a service you have to hand it over to a single supplier or consortium in order to operate a contract with it. In this case a system whereby our Concentrators were supplied by one company and our Oxygen provided by Community Pharmacists and in mine and other cases other equipment was either supplied by Hospitals or Privately. This system might appear to be a mishmash. However it had the beauty of being incredibly flexible. We all dealt with trained professionals at every point. The problem was that many people were not getting perhaps the best equipment to help them along in their lives. Also concentrator machines were not given out to people who would have benefited from them. But an aspect of the system was that in an area you had many alternative outlets from where to obtain Oxygen. Over 40 in the London Borough of Ealing alone. The new Home Oxygen Service put a single Company in each region. We were meant to get nursing support to assess patients and were to have the best and latest equipment and lives were to be enhanced. However things did not match the Brochure on O-Day. There was an underestimation of numbers and the cut over on February 1st 2006 was a disaster with the companies swamped with the new hoof forms and unable to cope. The Community Pharmacists came to the rescue whilst the companies tried to get to grips with things. Doctors were blamed by some, for not filling in forms correctly but overall the planning and execution of a big bang change over was over ambitious and doomed. During this weekend it is believed that at least one person died as a result of not being able to get the Oxygen they needed. As time went on Doctors and Pharmacists just carried on prescribing Oxygen to take the pressure off. Finally in August some action in one company giving up territory to another to relieve pressure that had occurred. A company clearly could not cope and had to give up. But what of the future? For regular Oxygen users like myself the logistics of such changes must surely increase the cost to the NHS of having to get numerous deliveries on an almost weekly basis as against one monthly prescription with many of us picking up our own Oxygen thus alleviating the work and cost to the pharmacist or supplier. |
|
Send mail to
contact@oxywalk.org with
questions or comments about this web site. |