This is from the Guardian today: GP surgeries should be set up at hospitals to ease the growing pressure on accident and emergency units, which are struggling to cope with an “unsustainable” increase in patients, a report from the UK’s emergencydoctors warns. Family doctors, as well as nurses and specialists in looking after frail elderly people, need to
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Richard Blogger, who has quite a reputation in exposing what has been going on in NHS privatisation, left a comment on this blog yesterday that I thought worth sharing as a blog in its own right. He said: Cameron says that to save a measly £20m he will introduce NHS charges for immigrants. This means two things. Firstly, everyone will
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It’s now certain the Tories have got it in for the NHS. As the FT reports today: Cabinet ministers will on Tuesday mount a collective attack on the “ringfence” protecting the NHS from budget cuts, as the search for £11.5bn of election year savings reaches a critical stage. So much for this: So far they’ve
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Last night the Lords approved the regulations that will effectively privatise the NHS, and this diagram from the latest New Economics Foundation / Tax Justice Network mythbuster shows why: With the NHS privatised companies can cream off the NHS budget for themselves and we’ll move towards US cost levels, inevitably, as the cost of admin and litigation will spiral out of control
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Blogging will be somewhat limited today, and maybe tomorrow. My job today is to provide support to a relative in hospital, and that is taking priority over other concerns. But it does at the same time make me appreciate, yet again, the amazing service the NHS provides. And it also makes me appreciate, as a
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I was mentioned in a tweet this morning. Now that’s not news, but this one caught my attention. It said: The link is here – but it’s behind a paywall, so I hunted down the author to find what this was all about. Social media (for example Facebook and YouTube) uses online and mobile technologies to allow
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As the Guardian reports this morning: Serco, the leading private contractor of government services, fiddled its data when reporting to the NHS on targets it had failed to meet, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). The independent watchdog’s investigation into Serco’s out-of-hours GP service in Cornwall, published on Thursday, comes after the Guardian revealed last May that whistleblowers had concerns that the
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Clive Peedell is a man for whom I have a lot of time. A founder of the NHS Action party, a consultant in Middlesborough and a member of the BMA Council, few doctors have their finger on the pulse of the NHS the way he has. He’s written in the Guardian this morning, saying: The
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The Guardian reports this morning that: The largest private provider of NHS out-of-hours GP services is facing allegations by senior doctors that its service in London is so short-staffed it is regularly unsafe. There is a reason why this is happening. It’s called money. And it’s called a total lack of understanding on the part of government and private companies that health
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