I confess that I enjoyed this comment in this morning's Times Red Box email:
This year ... marks 70 years of two of our great national institutions: the National Health Service and "David Davis". One is a hugely expensive, abstract concept born out of a different political age and now prone to long delays, broken promises and poor quality service. The other is where you go when you're poorly.
Quite so.
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Your starry eyed supplication to the myth of the NHS is almost Stalinist. Back around 1950 my doctor uncle, UCD, whose office I helped take care of was very fed up with all the bureaucratic nonsense being inflicted on GP’s. They were too prone to telling doctors what they should not do rather than what they should. Later, when playing rugby against the leading Hospital teams, the general opinion was that the NHS bureaucracy etc. was not just holding back and preventing progress, for example rationing and restricting antibiotics, but actually damaging the Teaching Hospitals. Later, when being involved in planning for a new hospital that had been delayed over two decades Whitehall mucked up the plans, they couldn’t even get the lifts right.
Come on! This is ludicrous
Of course a national organisation has rules that are @ little stiff on occassion. So too does every large company
And they too get the lifts wrong sometimes
It is called being human. Stalinism is nowhere near it
Your comment is crass
“Your starry eyed supplication to the myth of the NHS is almost Stalinist.”
Dude,
That sentence is almost Stalinist
Demetrius
Given your past contributions here I am surprised by your comments. You are entitled to them but I feel that I must speak up.
I have worked in both public and private institutions (big companies) and I can tell you that both have infinite capacity to mess things up. The common factor is that they both employ human beings to do the job. Nothing more. It is the locus of the human capital employed that determines where success or failure occurs – private or public.
Having also studied management the past 10 years I can triangulate the facts about my statement more than adequately. I’ve seen countless case studies of failure in both sectors as well as seeing it with my own eyes.
Regarding the NHS, may I recommend that you read ‘The Five Giants’ by Nicholas Timmins? I believe there maybe a revised version available?
Timmins recounts that the NHS has been under attack since the day it was founded and what you have is Governments – not the NHS itself – cost cutting by introducing private sector – dividend enhancing policies totally at odds with public sector service ethos.
The story of the NHS since its creation is one of reduction from day one in order to contain costs because (basically) politicians have become hoodwinked over time into thinking that they cannot print money to sustain the service because all money must come from tax (utter rubbish) which they compete with each other to charge the lowest rates . And then having done that, budget restrictions come in.
Then – consider the lack of joined up thinking around the selling off of playing fields, lax attitudes to the selling of alcohol, sugar etc., all heavily influenced by lobbying.
As I think Larry Elliott said recently looking at policy going forward, any move by a Left wing Government to regenerate the public sector will be countered and attacked by the Right. To me the history of the NHS proves that he is right because it has already happened and continues to do so.
Never forget this: the British way for a Government to manufacture consent for change (ergo: cut or privatise something) is to manage it badly so that people have no choice to accept change in the end.
Whitehall did this with the Beeching cuts and they have been doing this for years with the NHS even now. And it happens because (1) there are politicians and civil servants who are and always will, be ideologically opposed to the NHS as it was created and (2) there are carpet baggers in both institutions who will become well paid landlords for people like Richard Branson and others.
“Left wing gov'” ? I’d suggest that the one-nation tory govs of the 1950s would now be considered “left wing”. A possible way to counter the moral corruption within both politics & the “civil” (ha!) service might be to have greater citizen involvement at local, regional and national levels. I’m talking people selected using the system for selecting juries and sitting for a set period of time (e.g. 1 year or 18 months). & at the risk of sounding like a broken record – yes I’m talking about Van Reybrouck’s “Against Elections”. Large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats are untrustworthy – they need somebody looking over their shoulders to keep ’em honest. Only citizens can do that.
I don’t want to kick off a long debate about the NHS. Inevitably so much in life is coloured by one’s own personal experience. Just to say that last year I had major (but routine) surgery at my local NHS hospital and it couldn’t have been better had I been a private patient at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. The surgeon who operated said it would have cost over $100,000 there, excl. home care, with the same outcome (success rate). Here it was a seamless procedure & totally free – including the friendly, efficient post-operative care at home.
Of course others have different experiences. The NHS is routinely considered to be among the best health care services in the world. However, as you imply Richard, all large organisations need constant reappraisal to ensure maximum efficiency. But this government’s mantra that its ‘money’ is scarce is verging on the criminal. Hospitals do not need to raise £174m for legitimate parking in order to fund their services. No wonder the public is confused and scared.
‘Later, when playing rugby against the leading Hospital teams’
So, the bureaucracy was inhibiting their attacking ability due to excessive bureaucratic emphasis on the offside line?
I have to say my personal experience of the nhs has been excellent, from a friends appendix removal in a large central London hospital, a close relatives few months stay at a psychiatric facility in Guildford, to my own minor issue in a&e in central london. All the stuff were good natured and cheerful. It’s experiences like this that mean I feel less bad about the amount of tax I pay
Are you really unable to imagine all the other benefits you get?
Perfectly able to. But I, along with many others, object when tax revenue is not spent on things like the nhs but “wasted” on the many items of government expenditure that is of no use to anyone.
I might well blog my response to this
Could be worse, you could go private in the UK.
Of course, if anything goes wrong in your private health nirvana, you are extremely likely to end-up in an NHS hospital. Private doesn’t do intensive or high-dependency care very much; too costly.
Oh, and: https://chpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CHPI-PatientSafetyPaterson-Nov29.pdf
I have worked in the private & public sectors. Any idea that waste & inefficiency are confined to the latter is absurd.
The greatest waste I have ever seen was when I worked for an oil company in Aberdeen. I could give countless examples of shameful conduct but will mention only the one that offended me the most.
I found a room with Sun workstations worth may tens of thousands of pounds that had simply been abandoned (approximate value £100,000). When I inquired why they hadn’t been donated to a university or institute of technology I was told because they were too expensive; it would need to be approved by the board, who would only ask questions about why new equipment was being disposed of, and that would never do.
When everything you buy can be offset against tax at 97% or thereabouts you can be as wasteful as you like. Only when things like Piper Alpha happen is the curtain ever pulled back.
Recent reports suggest that the cost of the level of waste in the US healthcare system would cover health insurance for 150m people. Does anyone credible believe the NHS is that wasteful?
My own experience of both sectors is that they are more similar than not, as they both employ people, but the worst waste & inhumanity I experienced was in the former, and the greatest dedication & humanity in the latter. Both are capable of failure and to suggest otherwise is simply foolish.
As a non-Brit I remain of the view that the ideas and principles behind the NHS, so magnificently, characteristically, and even defiantly, celebrated in the last Olympics opening ceremony are the most admirable thing about the UK. And, of course, the people who have upheld them.
The most wasteful thing that is happening now is requiring all routine surgery to be cancelled because there are not enough beds for emergency care. Expensive surgeons and theatre staff left doing nothing. A very very direct result of this Government’s underfunding.
And all year round an enormous amount of staff time is wasted trying to find beds for patients, and an increased risk to patients by moving them from ward to ward to try and get them to the place they should have been admitted to in the first place.