NHS Fiasco

Various health authorities had been predicting another pandemic for several years and I think I remember from discussions at the start of the pandemic that the UK government had carried out an exercise in 2016 to assess the UK's readiness to deal with such a pandemic. This had highlighted problems like shortage of PPE. So our government had a lot of current information of what was required if a pandemic happened. The pandemic could only have been termed unprecedented because the government chose to ignore warnings.

Jim.

Referring to Martins post about the allocation of duties where ward assistants feed the patients it has always intrigued me why the food for patients is served by those whose responsibility it is to clean the ward toilets ! ! ! Dave W

I'm not sure it is, I think cleaners are a separate team.

regards Martin

How is the BMA, which is effectively the doctors' trade union, and of which membership is voluntary, responsible for the mess? The BMA is not particularly politically effective, and has not held the population or the government to ransom, and it isn't responsible for a shortage of doctors. Indeed, it would like there to be more doctors, and thus a larger membership.

In our house the people who clean also prepare the food and do every other domestic task, you could be picking up dog poop then cooking breakfast. You have to believe that washing with soap and hot water is sufficient to maintain a decent standard of hygiene.

Mike

It is generally held that one of the major reasons for GP s leaving the profession is the changes to lifetime allowance for pensions. If you have reached your limit as a working GP it becomes less attractive to carry on working so many have and are retiring. Another unintended consequence of government action.

But yes the country does need to train more doctors and there just aren’t enough medical schools.

regards Martin

The NHS hospital cleaners used to be hospital employees. They knew the job, knew the staff, and knew how to behave in hospitals. Part of Mrs Thatcher's pseudo-business ideological mistake was to 'encourage competition' by hiving off some areas of the NHS to commercial businesses. The idea was that, for instance, a number of commercial cleaning companies would bid for the business of cleaning the local hospital. Any profits made would, naturally, be money 'taken' from the NHS. The NHS already paid cleaners at the low end of their job's pay scale, so how was that ever going to save the NHS money? Well, of course, it resulted in fewer cleaners, many of them who didn't know the job, and less-clean hospitals. In all cases where activity was 'privatised', it had to be financially attractive to the 'private' firms, thus it had to disadvantage both the workers and the NHS. And still, there was an enormous increase in 'managers', getting in the way and drawing fat salaries - and pensions. Their value to the NHS was, of course, not monitored.

Hospital 'Trusts' were invented, supposedly as competing health providers. The insane idea was that these hospitals would compete for business, the 'cheapest' getting the contracts. So patients were expected to travel well beyond their local hospital to get a treatment no longer available locally, because it couldn't be provided 'competitively'? Well, that may work in London, or where there is a high density of hospitals, but what if you lived in Truro, for instance?

Trusts became 'brands' and their management liked to do things like changing the letterhead of the hospital stationery. That was pointless, expensive, and took money away from healthcare delivery. The 'shop floor workers' protested, but bureaucrats generally win.

Does anyone remember the TV series in which Sir John Harvey Jones (hope I've got the name right) was parachuted into various firms, to solve all their problems? He went to the Morgan Car Co., and 'discovered' a living fossil that obviously had no future unless it did all sorts of stupid things that he suggested. He predicted that the company would die within a few years if it carried on as it was. It presumably never occurred to him that he knew nothing of the car industry, nor the preferences of its customers, nor the value of craftsmanship, and was thus unqualified to comment. Like him, politicians' ignorance or competence is no bar to their pronouncements or careers. They seem oblivious to their errors.

Margaret wanted to completely privatise health something her chancellor Ken Clarke was opposed to and the only way he could head her off was to introduce the internal market as a delaying tactic. So whilst I for one would abhor these measures at least it prevented something worse. It took the Second World War to generate the kind of political and social environment to make the creation of the NHS possible let alone the rest of the welfare state, something that happens so rarely. Destroy it and you can never get it back. It’s not perfect but it’s an institution that is solely set on helping individual members of the population irrespective of who you are or what you are worth and that is something worth fighting for.

regards Martin