The blog with no name

Hospital readmissions are on the rise, prompting claims ministers are pressuring the NHS to release patients early to help cut waiting times.

Government figures, obtained by the Conservatives, showed that the number of emergency readmissions had risen by nearly a third since 2002.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said hospitals were discharging people too early because of NHS targets.

The government said readmissions were often unrelated to the earlier visit.

In the last quarter of 2002-3, 5.5% of patients were readmitted as emergency cases less than a month after being released.

There is evidence that the majority of readmissions are not linked to the patient's previous visit to hospital, but as a result of an on-going condition
Department of Health spokeswoman

By the last quarter of 2005-6, this had risen to 7.1%.

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I hate targets. I don't know most people on this planet but even among my friends and acquaintances I can think at least three cases of people that had to be readmitted as a matter of urgency after having been discharged and it was not because of other conditions. So unless everybody I know is very unlucky, there seems to be a sort of pattern here.

But then again being in hospital is also potentially dangerous

A father-of-two who had just beaten cancer died from Legionnaires' disease caused by a dirty hospital shower head, an inquest has heard.

Daryl Eyles, 37, died the day he was due to be discharged from Royal United Hospital (RUH) in Bath after months of chemotherapy for leukaemia.

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I was reading this National Geographic's article which in my opinion opens the usual can of worm.
Basically it says that partly because of some conservation policies and partly because of having been too poor to fully exploit the environment Castro's Cuba has a pretty pristine environment.

Once Castro goes when the economy develops and above all hordes of tourists will turn up all and this will change.

Now, that's bad but what right do I have as a citizen of a well developed country, surrounded by packaging, using my PC after I've eaten most of the cod in the North Sea to expect a Third World country to remain backward so that its environment is preserved?
Does economic development always have to go hand in hand with the destruction of the environment?
Is tourism always a good thing for the locals in the long term?