So the crowning achievement of new Labour, the NHS, isn't in such great shape after all. Despite the absolutely unprecedented levels of investment latest figures suggest the National Health service may have overspent by a record breaking £900 million!
Incidently, the fact that the NHS boss is standing down has nothing to do with any of this according to the Government. hmm, just a coincidence then.
And if you want to get really depressed visit the NHS Blog Doctor's website for an inside view of the national health service from a working doctor. Here's an extract:
"I, Dr John Crippen, now publicly to admit to an action of gullibility, of the most credulous stupidity, an action which had the most dire consequence and an action for which I expect to spend many years in purgatory. I was not alone in this action. There were others. Several million others. This gives me comfort. It goes, perhaps, to mitigation, but it is no excuse.
In 1997 I voted for Tony Blair.
I believed him. I believed in him. He was a decent man, a man who was going to make a difference to the two things I care most about in this country. Healthcare and education. Well, he has certainly made a difference. But not in the way I hoped.
The standard of health care, despite all the millions poured in by Gordon Brown, is worse than it has ever been in my lifetime. When I started as a doctor, I could genuinely say to patients that they really did not need private health insurance. Better bed and breakfast perhaps, but the NHS still delivered. Now I tell people to keep up their BUPA payments whatever the cost. Sell your daughters into the slave trade if necessary, but do not forgo private medical insurance."
Why is there no grown up debate about the NHS among our Politicians. And why this terror at contemplating NOT making the NHS free at the point of entry. As the good doctor says in his blog:
"Healthcare “free at the point of entry” into the system. Why? Healthcare is important. But it is not as important as nutrition, as food. Why is food not “free at the point of entry” into the supermarket?"
Rebuttals welcome.
8 comments:
800 senior doctors say NHS is doomed to fail without radical changes in funding and approach:
We must rethink NHS, plead senior doctors
'Professor Karol Sikora, one of the letter’s signatories, a cancer specialist, said: “Doctors are apathetic, politically. Few belong to political parties, but they are getting to the end of their tether. The problem for the future is going to be matching the consumerist demand from patients, especially the young, with the social equity of the NHS. The system we have today is heavy on bureaucracy and poor on delivery. “It is doomed to fail, because with a single monolithic employer it cannot adapt to either technical or societal change. Compared to that, what we see in Europe are far more flexible systems that cost no more and deliver much better care.”
Christoph Lees, a consultant in obstetrics and a co-signatory, said: “Centrally dictated targets do produce some results but they distort priorities. Those specialties outside the target areas become Cinderellas — mental health and maternity services are examples. The attempts to save money are undermining clinical relationships in an outrageous way. It’s a doctor’s obligation to act in the patient’s best interests, but often we can no longer do that.”
David Wrede, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist and a former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate, said: “Ministers talk the language of choice, but there is less choice now than there was years ago, when we could refer patients to anywhere we wanted,” he said.
Doctors for Reform believes that only by opening up the NHS to different sources of financing will it be liberated, allowing “a modern, truly comprehensive system” to emerge.
Andrew Holdenby believed that political leaders were reluctant to tamper with the NHS because they were convinced the public was devoted to it, but the Reform poll, carried out at the end of March by ICM, suggests that this is a myth.'
This story in the Times caught my attention:
One way to cut waiting lists:don't treat people with the wrong views
Notebook by Mick Hume
"IT IS BAD enough that you can be refused medical treatment on the NHS for eating, drinking or smoking too much. Now it seems that you can be denied an operation for protesting too much in support of your religious or political beliefs.
Edward Atkinson, a 75-year-old anti-abortion activist, was jailed recently for 28 days for sending photographs of aborted foetuses to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. That draconian sentence was not deemed punishment enough: the hospital has banned Mr Atkinson from receiving the hip replacement operation he was expecting.
Mr Atkinson sounds like an unpleasant crank, and I am as much in favour of legalised abortion as he is against it. But his treatment (or the lack of it) is a scandal. This is about admitting a man to hospital, not electing him to Parliament. Even unhip old bigots need replacement hips."
'British citizens in British NHS Hospitals are suffering from malnutrition'
The Government admits that:
last year seventeen million hospital meals were thrown away untouched
40% of hospital patients have malnutrition
Over 50% of hospital inpatients lose weight or become undernourished
Full report in The Times
Sixty died at hospital after patients left in human filth
More than 60 people died at a single hospital from complications linked to the superbug Clostridium difficile as a result of serious failings of senior management, a highly critical report said today.
Two outbreaks at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in Buckinghamshire, killed more than 33 people, while a culture of poor hygiene and hospital managers’ failure to act contributed to several dozen additional deaths since 2003, the health inspectorate said.
The report — which detailed a catalogue of serious hygiene offences including faeces on bed rails and patients’ clothes kept on the floor — was published as annual figures revealed that rates of C. difficile in patients over the age of 65 have risen across England by 17.2 per cent in the last year.
[...]
Andy Burnham, the Health Minister, said that its medical advisers would study the report’s recommendations. "What happened at Stoke Mandeville is inexcusable and must not be allowed to happen again," he said.
Interview with Andy Burnham, Health Minister in The Spectactor:
'Andy Burnham is appalled. I had only asked whether there is any truth in the popular Westminster rumour about the ‘Primrose Hill Set’ — where he and other young Labour ministers allegedly meet on Sunday afternoons in the north London home of David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, to discuss life and politics. It sounded plausible enough: aged just 36, he is a health minister and tipped as one of Labour’s brightest hopes for the future. But the idea of belonging to a bourgeois dining club is, to him, almost libellous.
‘I have never had lunch in Primrose Hill,’ he declares. ‘The thing that excites me at the moment is a chip shop I’ve found which sells both mushy peas and gravy. That’s more me than Primrose Hill. And that is where I certainly do not fit the archetypal New Labour mould.’ But does he socialise with this group of ministers — they are all friends? ‘Of course. But I have never had lunch, dinner or even breakfast in Primrose Hill.’
[...]
He has already navigated several hurdles quite successfully. Within the Department of Health, arguably the toughest beat in Whitehall, he is known as a fixer able to make peace with warring factions. ‘It’s impossible not to like him,’ says one mandarin.'
Revealed: the 13 bankrupt NHS trusts
'Alice in Wonderland' rules leave hospitals facing £1.6bn deficit
At least a dozen NHS hospital trusts are technically bankrupt, with no chance of meeting a legal obligation to balance their books, a Guardian investigation has revealed.
Data provided by the Department of Health under the Freedom of Information Act showed 103 hospital trusts across England expect to end the year with accumulated deficits of £1.6bn, caused by overspending since 2001.
Many are taking corrective action, including laying off staff, closing wards and reducing the time patients spend in hospital. But the Guardian has identified a group of trusts that have passed the point of no return.'
From the same article, this is apparently the crucial bit. Britain's civil service once had a reputation for efficiency as well as incorruptibility. What the hell happened?
Their financial difficulties became impossible to manage due to a mistake made by the DoH and the Treasury in 2001, when they put NHS trusts under a financial regime known as Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB).
The new system was designed to regulate spending by Whitehall departments, but had a devastating effect when it was applied to overspending hospital trusts. If a trust spent £105m, but had an income of only £100m, it would end the year with a deficit of £5m. The new rules sliced £5m from its income in the following year and obliged it to make a £5m surplus. That required the trust to cut its spending from £105m to £90m. Trusts faced with this triple whammy could not achieve the target without damaging patient care and so their deficits escalated.
Newer thread:
NHS and alternative health care systems
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