Second Life: National Health Service (UK): (Photo credit: rosefirerising)
This is an important, MUST READ article from the Guardian. Check it out!
via Top doctors warn of ‘worst winter’ in hospitals as A&E crisis grows | Society | The Observer.
Personally, I think that the media, especially the progressive views of the Guardian, are part of the problem.
As I have indicated many times on this blog, in my view, the NHS is beyond effective reform and needs scrapping, with a new UK public health system pioneered, based on best-of- class practice, in Germany, France, Italy etc.
Surely, it’s time to turn to evidence-based policy on UK healthcare?
Any thoughts?
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Dr Alf's Blog 
The Guardian, the Trades Unions in the NHS and the BBC collectively, are always calling for more money for the NHS because that is their solution to everything.
First mislead and frighten the people, with tales of gloom and doom, then frighten them some more, with tales of soiled and malodorous pensioners being left to die on hospital trolleys, bed blocking and long waiting lists and then put it all down to lack of money and Government callousness.
Dr Alf has lost none of the forensic ability to drill down to the facts that stood him in good stead in a successful commercial life as a Financial Director for substantial organisations and in his second incarnation as a interim executive, specializing in radical transformation, prior to becoming a professional blogger and commentator on the state of political life, global trends and the country he once lived and worked in.
He has correctly identified the NHS as being beyond repair and in need of replacement by something better.
I know this from my insurance background, from having compared the NHS with better foreign healthcare systems in France, Germany and Italy and from intimate personal knowledge of the NHS involving tracking former tenants through the system from treatment right through to arranging their funerals, following the NHS complaints system through from beginning to end.
This was, with MP involvement in the case of my own parents’ treatment over cateracts, heart conditions, the fitting of my late father’s pacemaker, my late mother’s knee replacements and cateract operations, all which were initially refused on cost grounds by an NHS Trust which through gross mismanagement was discovered to be losing£50 million gbp a year and supposedly without the knowledge of the Chief Executive.
That Chief Executive is still there, even after bringing in PwC, at a cost of £1 million gbp, to tell him and his board that he was really losing £50 million gbp a year at a time when like 12 wise monkeys not one of them actually knew the extent of the loss or even if they were making one at all.
After that, the board was “strengthened” by adding more directors on salaries of over £100,000 gbp a year and all the other directors and the CEO gave themselves a pay rise.
We know from the Staffordshire debacle, and scandal after scandal, that it is not just a few bad apples but the rot continues.
The revolving door of multi-million pound payoffs to NHS executives, who leave on Monday and come back on Friday, at higher pay, continues and we have the lowest longevity out of all countries in Western Europe outside of Greece, and the worst cancer treatment outcomes in the whole of Western Europe.
Combine that with the fattest woman in Western Europe, a diabetes epidemic and a dementia epidemic, plus the running sore of Adult Social Care, we can safely conclude that the NHS needs to be replaced with something much better.
Can it be done?
The present Government has 19 months to run, and is in many respects a lame duck on borrowed time.
It is facing the official Opposition which is packing the BBC and other organisations with Labour placemen, like James Purnell and his henchmen, ready to slow down reform, whilst the real roadblocks to meaningful change sit in the Civil Service and outside in the form of Druids and their fellow travelers, who if they could, would bring the UK back into the Middle Ages, Paganism and serfdom within a feudal society, in my view.
That is to say, a Britain without computers, industry, infrastructure, mobile phones, high tech medicine and the exports, productivity and inward investment needed to remain a first world country with a fit for purpose healthcare system and a healthy and mentally sharp population guided by Judeo-Christian philosophy and the “Golden Rule”.