NHS Job Shop: “Working for Health” in Kentish Town. Closed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I agree with Dr Alf that this latest evidence on the collapse in NHS productivity is important ahead of the UK election.
The NHS, according to its new CEO, has a funding shortfall of £8 billion gbp, which is £6 billion gbp more than the Treasury “expected”.
In addition, we have 1.25 million woman over the age of 65, with early stage dementia and the fattest woman in Western Europe.
This will mean more diabetes, more expensive stomach stapling surgery and even less worker productivity as if being 20th in the world wasn’t bad enough.
We have had 15 years of illegal immigration with numbers running at 250,000 a year (we know this from the number of notes and coins in circulation,the amount of food purchased and consumed which exceeds what could possibly be eaten by the official population and we know this from mid term school admissions of children of undocumented immigrants).
David Cameron has said that NHS spending is “ring fenced” but with numbers like this it will mean less per patient.
Productivity in the NHS has been declining not because of re-organisations but because of too many NHS managers and a failure on the part of NHS trades-unions to adopt modern working practices or meaningful reforms.
Hinchingbrooke Hospital, in Huntingdon, was the first privatized hospital within the NHS but its management failed to deal with the tactics and modus operandi of the Unite Trades union and so the bold experiment failed and the hospital went back into the dead-hand of NHS control.
The Government and successive governments before them, have done nothing to educate the public about cooking, the need for proper nutrition, exercise and sensible eating.
They have done nothing about harmful chemicals in plastics, food packaging, fertilizers, water and aircraft fuel and even less about the public’s desire to consume alcohol on an empty stomach.
The British public need to be made to face up to their responsibilities to look after their own health but politicians are afraid to confront them with the truth as evidenced by the above post and people who think that way.
The UK’s healthcare system already probably kills 120,000 people a year through botched operations, spends 20% of its entire budget on ambulance-chasing lawyers, gagging orders, payoffs to sacked employees and a further 70,000 through GP’s making honest mistakes with diagnoses.
Its cancer treatment outcomes are the worst in Western Europe bar Greece – and Germany, France, Italy and Singapore all have healthcare systems that makes our NHS look like something that you might see in a film about the Crimean War featuring an actress playing the role of Florence Nightingale and a bewhiskered actor sawing off the legs of injured cavalrymen injured by Russian shelling.
The NHS constantly bleats about “resources” but does nothing about malingers (usually pensioners who have nothing wrong with them) plus people looking to extend their weekends, holidays, Bank Holidays, half terms and avoid work.
Many of these people, plus drunks and drug addicts end up in A&E at weekends, causing the so-called A&E crisis.
Over and above this, we have local authorities which at County, Unitary, London Borough and Metropolitan Borough level spend 50% of their entire budgets on Adult Social Care recipients who are often in and out of NHS hospitals and who have to be looked after armies of social workers,carers and other staff.
The NHS and Adult Social Care provision needed to be merged years ago but again politicians have been too afraid to confront inefficient and venal local authorities and the medical profession /health service unions.
The NHS in merged form needs to copy global best practice and to do that consultants and interims with no NHS experience need to be brought in to effect meaningful change to a system that embodies the best elements of German, French, Singaporean and Italian practice.
Using people with NHS experience simply adds to the failure already in existence, so these interims and consultants need to be replaced with people who can do the job without “going native” or buckling under pressure applied by NHS managers and directors who really represent roadblocks to any meaningful reform.
English: NHS logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dr Alf's Blog 