NHS Job Shop: “Working for Health” in Kentish Town. Closed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s another excellent, hard-hitting, article by Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent, at the Telegraph. It’s a MUST READ article in my view.
via Callous: the verdict on NHS care for the dying – Telegraph.
Sadly, this article is just the latest in the flood of bad news and crises in the UK National Health Services (NHS).
This blog has consistently argued that, on David Cameron’s watch, the NHS is in terminal decline and needs to be replaced with a new public health service, based on the best practice in other countries like Germany and France.
Any thoughts?
Related articles
- Does telemedicine deserve the green light? (intechnology.co.uk)
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The basic problem is one of size – my usual rant. Successful private sector conglomerates carve themselves into smaller and smaller bits each under separate management linked only by the need to be profitable, legal and within very broad corporate guidelines. Governments tend to do the reverse and try to micro-manage from the top.
A solution? Tricky but in the end probably based on competition with an element of patient charging and “national insurance” meeting major costs.
Rodney, thanks for sharing your views. I agree that NHS is too big to manage. So far, the mainstream media still thinks that it can be rescued. In my view, a radical solution is need as proposed, for example, by John Gelmini.
To be fair the decline of the NHS started under Gordon Brown with the inception of the Wanless Review which injected £7 billion gbp into the NHS, none of which produced any productivity improvement and any benefit that might have ensued was eaten up by increased wages and NI contributions.
The rot continued under David Cameron when instead of backing the Lansley Reforms he started a process of “listening to the healthcare professionals”.
This “listening process” was to yield to pressure from Sir David Nicholson the disgraced NHS Chief who allowed the terrible events in Staffordshire and needless deaths elsewhere to occur on his watch.
The satirical magazine Private Eye ran a story before Andrew Lansley’s removal as Health Secretary demonstrating how Sir David Nicholson was deliberately undermining the reforms particularly to the “commissioning ” processes.
Instead of backing his Minister David Cameron sacked him and replaced Lansley with the more telegenic Jeremy Hunt and then continued to have complete faith in Sir David Nicholson a man who should have been dismissed for incompetence and bungling without any compensation and personally surcharged.
The NHS does need complete reform starting with the removal of all but 4 layers of management and continuing through to the merger of the Adult Social Care and NHS budgets.
It does not need to be privatised but does need hard commercial focus in procurement particularly in the area of purchasing drugs which are up to 2000% too expensive(See article in the Independent).
Some things like printing,cleaning,parking,the typing of patient notes,grounds maintenance,IT and administration can be outsourced and strategically insourced and hospital consultants cannot be allowed to create waiting lists to build their private practices.
This last objective can be achieved through the use and application of “expert systems” to enable more specialist work to be done at lower cost and with fewer people.
The NHS needs to focus more on stopping people from getting ill in the first place so measures here would include:
–Variable taxes on foods
–Teaching people how to cook
–Encouraging people not to drink on an empty stomach
–Promoting exercise and vitamin supplementation
–Reintroduce Vitamin B17 into our diet
–Opt out of Alimentarius Commission directives on food and supplements
–Forcing the NHS and civil servants to see food as part of a person,s treatment
–Refusing operations to those people who are smokers or morbidly obese until they stop smoking or reduce their weight
–Paying doctors for keeping people well not the size of their patient lists
–Teaching people a Stoic philosophy ,Zen,meditation and NLP so that they are better able to cope with the vicissitudes of life
–Tax breaks for PMI policies
–Promoting traditional marriage in the tax system and discouraging bizarre and unusual lifestyles which produce dangerous health outcomes and lead to greater mortality at an earlier age Note:In this regard traditional marriage leads to the longest and most healthy lives,stable cohabitees live the next longest along with spinsters and single men especially if they are out of work die the fastest.
–Stopping any further moves to make divorce or cohabitee breakup easier ,cheaper or faster and sacking /retiring early those judges in the Family Court Division who want to bring in American style “No fault divorce”
–Using work scheduling software in hospitals to roster nurses and doctors to meet peaks and troughs in demand
–Weeding out malingerers in GP surgeries
–Making people more responsible for their own health
–Removing, as far as possible salt, sugar, additives and harmful chemicals from food, drinking water, air and the environment
–Banning the use of amalgum containing mercury for dental fillings
–Planting more broad leaved trees around roads,motorways and industrial areas
–Putting air cleaning FICA plants in offices and factories
–Stop building any houses within 1 kilometer of an electricity pylon or sub station(banned in Russia because it causes cancer)