Save the NHS!

Health Minister Jeremy Hunt scraping the barrel today, blaming Labour for the GP contracts that the Royal College of Physicians mentioned as one of the causes of the current A&E crisis. Some guy from the RCP on C4 new ripping Jeremy a new one. For the avoidance of doubt, this is a whole system problem and not attributable to any one thing. Nevertheless it is a very serious problem NOW, why aren't the government doing anything about it? The minister's complacency is damaging.

The govt isnt doing anything as therre is no money to do antthing.
What would you do scorza?
How will you fix things?
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23152697

Government's new 111 service moves from crisis into err... even deeper crisis as NHS Direct pulls out of two contracts. What exactly was wrong with NHS Direct as a nationwide service? Why did we need competition? A case of saving pennies costing pounds if ever there was one.
 
The govt isnt doing anything as therre is no money to do antthing.
What would you do scorza?
How will you fix things?

I would listen to the professionals. I would not engage in a top down re-organisation of the NHS. The government keeps telling us that the NHS budget has not been affected by cuts, so how have they managed to create this awful mess in the healthcare system?

Politics aside, this is really serious. Any of us could need A&E care at any time and the system can't cope at the moment. Think about what you'd do if you suddenly started with severe chest pains.
 
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I would listen to the professionals. I would not engage in a top down re-organisation of the NHS. The government keeps telling us that the NHS budget has not been affected by cuts, so how have they managed to create this awful mess in the healthcare system?

Simply speaking, it's a nationalised industry with far too much bureaucracy thus ends up being run for the convenience of the employees not the patient (who can't vote with their feet and go elsewhere unless they're fairly well off) that's why.

The problem is not with the Doctors and Nurses, who are generally very conscientious - it's with the red tape and jobsworth administrators. I work for the NHS and see this every day. Between me and Executive Director level there are EIGHT layers of IT management and I'm a supervisor myself. Insane and would never happen in a company which had to pay salaries out of profits.

How would I fix it? Give everyone a personal healthcare account and let them choose which hospital, doctor or clinic to use (and receive the money for their care). If they want to drive 200 miles to a better hospital, let them. Many other countries in the world use this system or a variant of it to provide much better service and outcomes for their citizens.
 
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Lots more unnecessary deaths are about to be reported, what are we saving the NHS from again?

People who put patient care as more important than ideologies about ownership or running the service for the benefit of the staff I think.
 
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Well maybe if it were adequately funded, removed from constant political oversight, kept to its original purposes, allowed to do its job, protected from harmful immigration patterns, etc then it wouldn't be in the mess it is now descending into would it.

Anyway expect more damaging revelations soon ... the whistle is about to get blown well and truly on a few things.
 
Well maybe if it were adequately funded, removed from constant political oversight, kept to its original purposes, allowed to do its job, protected from harmful immigration patterns, etc then it wouldn't be in the mess it is now descending into would it.

Anyway expect more damaging revelations soon ... the whistle is about to get blown well and truly on a few things.

You cannot have a taxpayer funded monopoly without it getting involved in politics.
 
You cannot have a taxpayer funded monopoly without it getting involved in politics.

To the extent that it does atm with constant top-down reorganisation at great cost for no benefit whatsoever then yes you most certainly can.

The political imperative is to provide a broad direction and goal - this is something they have been wholly unprepared and unable to do. Unnecessary micromanagement beyond that is not only irresponsible and inefficient it's also indicative of poor management.
 
More doctors and nurses, less white collar workers punching figures into Excel.

Well you can't have that because everyone is too busy reorganising. It is also a bit of a misnomer because if those white collar workers are typing in Excel to free up the time of the front line staff then it hardly a bad thing.
 
Labour pumped billions into the NHS, funding isn't the issue.

Yes it is, firstly they pumped billions we didn't have into it, secondly they pumped hte money into all the wrong places. These hospitals with bad records and needless deaths, this isn't something that happened in the last 2 years, its something thats been on its way due to the MASSIVE mismanagement of the NHS by labour. They pumped billions into adding layer on layer of management to a system that already worked, rather than bumping up front line staffing levels they were creating paper work to generate jobs to prop up a failing economy. THe results come later after a massive screw up and the vast majority of the reasons for the seriously bad hospitals are due to the targets, management and completely wrong strategy implemented in the past decade, not the past couple of years.

Incidentally, this is what happens, on a more personal level, when one person buys a car or rents a flat he can't afford, ends up in debt, its NOT just the car or flat that goes, that person ends up with less money, paying off debt, increasing interest payments, he now has less money for food, for clothes, for entertainment as well as less money for a car or a flat.

Labour overspent EVERYWHERE by huge amounts mostly on utterly wasted projects that provided no long term employment, billions on late defence projects, billions on id schemes, billions on IT systems that got scrapped.

Everyone gets that we have less money, but people can't seem to understand that to spend less than the stupid amount Labour were spending, we need cut backs, and yet everyone complains about every single one saying it should be done elsewhere.

I don't think the Tories are doing a great job, though there isn't much way to do a great job. they need to restructure the entire management side of the NHS, do away with 50% of it, get a working IT system that works reliably and cheaply reduce spending but INCREASE frontline spending... by removing most of that management overhead.

THe department my dad worked in was merged with another department and the outside guy who was brought in who massively failed in his previous management position was paid about 30% more than the two previous directors of the separate hospitals combined. They increased costs, decreased efficiency, hired a failure who has since cause untold damage and the NHS has recently just lost a case of racial discrimination against this abomination of a manager. He's just a **** everyone who has ever worked near him thinks so, but he's "connected" and keeps getting better jobs in the NHS.

The amount of contracted, consultancy, pay offs, management wage increases, wasted spending in merging departments... not because merging is a waste but because they often employ the worst possible people to run these things.

The entire management side of the NHS has like everything else, become a political side show, governments create needless public sector jobs, throw spending at the NHS and tell the country how they have drastically increased spending and dropped waiting lists. They fake dropping waiting lists, put most of the spending into management positions that have made being a doctor/nurse harder, made the NHS less efficient and led to a decade of bad idea after bad idea.

The NHS is dying, the Tories aren't doing a particularly good job of saving it, Labour unquestionably are responsible, its been terrible for quite some time for quite a huge number of people, the numbers of horrendous things that have happened due to the restructuring done under Labour is only starting to come out now after years of pay offs and general lying about whats been going on.
 
People who put patient care as more important than ideologies about ownership or running the service for the benefit of the staff I think.

If you think that patient care is improving at the moment when we can all see the deteriorating situation in AE, or that patient care will improve when privatisation has taken full effect you're sadly mistaken. Care is not in the calculation for profit.
 
Well you can't have that because everyone is too busy reorganising. It is also a bit of a misnomer because if those white collar workers are typing in Excel to free up the time of the front line staff then it hardly a bad thing.


No one typing in excel is freeing up time for front line staff, almost none anyway and thats the problem. Once again the best thing I heard from family in the NHS was a job interview for a senior accounting position "what are your weaknesses".... "numeracy"..... she made screw up after screw up and couldn't get hire fired to save her life. Incompetant staff being hired because a lot can't work elsewhere, people who didn't turn up for ages, who made mistakes, didn't give a damn about their work while the other half of the department waste time correcting mistakes as well as doing all the work anyway.

Just about every department could run better with all the incompetant staff removed with half the workforce, because they do all the work anyway and wouldn't have to fix all the screw ups, nor spend months trying to fire people, and hire people.

If the NHS was privatised 20 years ago, half the backline staff simply wouldn't be there now, the incompetant ones would have been fired long ago, the hiring process would stop most of the rubbish ones being hired and the politically based reshuffling of the NHS every 3 years into something worse would never have happened.
 
Actually I think you'll find that by and large under Labour things did get better. Labour did not use the money efficiently, completely messed up on private income amongst a great many things. But to spin this as a Labour cockup is retards - all the parties have failed. And that money that was thrown at it barely raised it up to a satisfactory level compared to the systems people so freely compare against. Then when you consider we have a more difficult population to care for, with more things treated, etc you end up with the situation which is not what it was designed for.
 
No one typing in excel is freeing up time for front line staff, almost none anyway and thats the problem.

Oh, you know this from experience because I had a white collar "clinicians assistant" who used to save us a ton of time. Or are you just guessing? Are you going by real facts, personal experience or just plain propaganda.
 
Actually I think you'll find that by and large under Labour things did get better. Labour did not use the money efficiently, completely messed up on private income amongst a great many things. But to spin this as a Labour cockup is retards - all the parties have failed. And that money that was thrown at it barely raised it up to a satisfactory level compared to the systems people so freely compare against. Then when you consider we have a more difficult population to care for, with more things treated, etc you end up with the situation which is not what it was designed for.

Ask the families of the 13,000 if they agree.
 
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