Save the NHS!

No1newts said:
The cheapest option will generally win yes, in every other aspect of society we are pushing competition for people to produce better products at cheaper costs. God forbid we should introduce this into healthcare as well and actually make the system cost effective and efficent :eek::eek::eek:
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The problem of course is that if you always award a tender to the lowest bidder you do generally receive a quality of product or service thats associated with being the lowest bidder. It's not rocket science that the absolute cheapest way of doing something isn't neccesarily the best.
 
The biggest failure of the NHS is the complete lack of customer focus, caused by the complete lack of competition. The NHS should not be a jobs club, or a political statement, it is a means to provide healthcare. If it is not the best system for providing healthcare, it must be reformed, and that must be done by looking at the many more successful systems than ours...
 
Dolph said:
The biggest failure of the NHS is the complete lack of customer focus, caused by the complete lack of competition. The NHS should not be a jobs club, or a political statement, it is a means to provide healthcare. If it is not the best system for providing healthcare, it must be reformed, and that must be done by looking at the many more successful systems than ours...
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So nothing to do with pen pushers and number crunchers then?
 
scorza said:
Royal Mail. Private companies take the easy, profitable work i.e. mail pickup from city centres, leave the difficult bit, delivering to anywhere in the country, to the Royal Mail. Privatisation means privatise the profits, leave the liabilities socialised.
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That's an example of incredibly stupid regulation which forces the Royal Mail to subsidise private companies.

If you have similar examples for the governments plans for the NHS I'd suggest they should be the crux of your argument, that'd be killer material and would stop the governments plans dead.
 
[TW]Fox;19955813 said:
The problem of course is that if you always award a tender to the lowest bidder you do generally receive a quality of product or service thats associated with being the lowest bidder. It's not rocket science that the absolute cheapest way of doing something isn't neccesarily the best.
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Which is why you award to the best value tender, not the cheapest. Of course, the challenge comes in setting up the bidding process to ensure you get the best value...
 
[TW]Fox;19955813 said:
The problem of course is that if you always award a tender to the lowest bidder you do generally receive a quality of product or service thats associated with being the lowest bidder. It's not rocket science that the absolute cheapest way of doing something isn't neccesarily the best.
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I don't disagree. But they are hardly going to invite anyone and their mother to bid on healthcare, there will without a doubt be some sort of framework/accredatation in place to be able to tender in the first place.

This leaves you with 5 bidders who can all offer up to X standard of service. What is then the problem with going with the cheapest provider of the 5?

Still the moronic viewpoint in this country (not saying this is you yourself Fox, though it could be :D:p) that cheap = ****. This default assumption is moronic as someone could be better organised an leaner organisation, have a cheaper supply of X material needed to produce needed product, they might be mass producing to X amount of worldwide services and because of scale of production have cheaper sell on.

Surprisingly enough there are ways to produce a product in this world in a cheap way without it being poor quality. Work in a real business and not in an insulated public sector environment and you may well learn this (again not directed at you Fox :D)
 
Telescopi said:
That simply isn't true is it? The procurement process should lay out requirements and standards - if somebody else can do that at a lower cost and there's no reason to believe they will fail to deliver then there's no reason why they should not be given a chance.

Can you explain why private companies would do the easy work and leave the public sector with the hard work and why if this were the case it would be a bad thing? The requirements and standards would be the same whoever did it so surely if private companies are doing one thing more cheaply it would leave the public sector with more money to do what they do?
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No because the private company gets the money that would otherwise go to the public sector. In other words the NHS will have less money to do work of a greater overall complexity. You don't have to be a management consultant to know what the result of that will be - less inefficiency. It's a shame because the NHS is the most efficient healthcare system in the developed world, I wish more people in this country would recognise this and realise the NHS is worth investing in.

Telescopi said:
Again, I don't care if somebody is making a profit if I'm getting the same service or better and the government saves money to pay for more important things.
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Important things like what? Your local cardiac department which will almost certainly close as it's not cost effective to keep it open now all the profitable heart work get done at the private company down the road. Great if you are lucky enough to have a profitable heart condition, not so great if you don't.
 
As an employee with NHS I do sometimes think that private healthcare might actually be better for a patient.. I see so much wasted where I work and the organisation of it all is a disaster, it amazes me people actually go in ill and leave healthy:o
 
scorza said:
Same as every healthcare system then. Healthcare costs have increased dramatically across the world over the last few decades, why should the NHS be immune from that? Part of the problem with the NHS is that between 1980 and 2000 we didn't throw enough money at it, we've been playing catch up ever since until now when we've started going backwards again.
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Do you think that perhaps this report you have quoted, which gives legal opinion is a poor stick by which to judge future healthcare?
Seriously, laywers do law, not administration, and thats what we are talking about here, we are not talking healthcare, we are talking administration.
Either way the healthcare will be provided by medics.
 
ITs really simple.

Too few nurses
Too many middle managers with bull**** ambiguous titles
Private companies ripping the NHS off via procurement.


Thats it in a nutshell. Sort those three main issues out, and you would quite literally save BILLIONS.

In Scotland they hacked thousands of nurses' jobs, but kept the inept middle managers and seemingly totally unnacountable for their actions morons.
 
uknowist said:
As an employee with NHS I do sometimes think that private healthcare might actually be better for a patient.. I see so much wasted where I work and the organisation of it all is a disaster, it amazes me people actually go in ill and leave healthy:o
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See, the people who work for the NHS can see that it's never going to last as it is.

No1newts said:
Good lord that is a corker!

You should do stand up, it's sig worthy at the least!
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Guessing you've not read many of his threads? :o
 
Telescopi said:
That's an example of incredibly stupid regulation which forces the Royal Mail to subsidise private companies.

If you have similar examples for the governments plans for the NHS I'd suggest they should be the crux of your argument, that'd be killer material and would stop the governments plans dead.
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That's pretty much what any willing/qualified provider means. If a private company sees a business opportunity doing say, hip replacement operations, it can force the NHS into a bidding war for all the hip replacements ops in an area. The NHS will inevitably not be able to compete on price because the orthopaedic dept has to treat a range of conditions while the private company can set up a production line of one type of treatment. Net result, NHS is left with the difficult, expensive work (liabilities), the private company gets the cheap and comparatively easy work (profit).
 
Also to add to my point, I think the Nursing training in this country is appalling. Far too much focus on sociology of things rather than actual science and care. A newly qualified nurse whos trained to work in any department is not qualified catherterise a patient or even bleed them for blood samples.
 
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