Industry news roundup: week ended 19 Aug 2013:
Sometimes it feels like it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed, especially when you’re at danger from duplicitous bus drivers and exhausted junior doctors!
I know it sounds a bit strange, but just go with me on this one: a bus driver actually put innocent passengers at risk because he was involved in a ‘cash for crash’ scheme. I just heard about this: the Sheffield bus driver, Adam Herbert, was in cahoots with a group of fraudsters that packed his bus so he could intentionally prang a car from behind, despite the fact that the handful of passengers that weren’t in on the scheme could have been seriously hurt.
You know it’s bastards like this that give the personal injury compensation field a bad name. This slimy, underhanded criminal allegedly tried to pull off the massive scam so 26 co-conspirators could make bogus whiplash injury claims – can you believe it?
The bus company was puzzled why there were some 30 or 40 passengers on the vehicle at the time of the incident, especially because on any other given day there were usually only around six to eight people normally riding the bus at that time. It discovered that the handful of passengers that weren’t actually involved in the shameless stunt that it was actually a very minor bump and couldn’t have possibly caused the more than two dozen whiplash injuries other passengers were claiming, and once the bus company began to investigate the whole terrible scam unraveled.
Lucky there weren’t any actual serious injuries – it turns out that sometimes it’s more dangerous to go get treated for injury at hospital! New research I read this week indicated that junior doctors at NHS hospitals are so overworked that they feel so exhausted and demoralised that fears run high that these poor individuals are making mistakes that lead to medical negligence.
Many junior doctors work absolutely insane hours. 12 day rotations and 100 hour weeks are not uncommon for final year medical students and junior doctors alike, and the incredible amounts of pressure these medical staff are under is making fears run rampant – and with absolutely good reason, if you ask me!
Hopefully this is going to change very soon, because if it doesn’t NHS hospitals are going to be some of the least safest places to be if you’re injured or sick. It’s not the fault of these junior doctors, either – it’s the administrative staff that have abandoned these poor blokes and birds!