Hospital building in the NHS. Things that go wrong.

"And still manage to get it wrong," might be the rider added by many doctors. Criticisms of British hospitals are many and bitter. Some cannot be divorced from NHS politics. It is not due to policy alone that large sums of money were spent on teaching hospitals while patients in asylums lived in squalor, nor was it due to policy that elsewhere district general hospitals were postponed as their money went to paper over the cracks in those same asylums. But other criticisms are more specific to many of the new hospitals built since 1948: they took years to build and their costs escalated; their roofs leak, their cladding falls off, they are ugly and grow shabby within years; mistakes in one hospital are repeated in others. Critics point to the perennial problems of storage space, and there are plenty of examples of sheer incompetence: drains going uphill, mortuary floors with no fall for drainage, piped gas systems installed upside down. The critics point to Europe and America, where they see large, well built hospitals run without problems: to the Middle East, where British planners and architects can build good looking hospitals fast; and to the private sector in Britain, where again building is fast and the quality good.