Hah, how could the NHS lead to serfdom?
He never notes that the bottlenecks preventing such things from happening are almost wholly beyond NHS control. Those external factors include the chronic underfunding of social care so that people cannot be safely discharged from hospitals, and the massive health problems created simultaneously by big sugar that wants to drive the UK population into ill health through vast over-consumption of highly addictive ultra-processed, and big pharma that wishes to over-medicalise the resulting conditions without pointing out that many of them are treatable or preventable if only we were better fed and drank less, neither of which is almost ever mentioned by a politician seeking to retain favour with both such groups.
When government provides your healthcare the call will be for government to force your diet so as to benefit the healthcare system. QED.
Of course, it would never happen, Ho No.
This from a bloke whose pie consumption has led to a national shortage, judging by his jowly mug…
If everything wasn’t so shit in the Modern World we wouldn’t all have to live on chocolate and booze to see us through it.
How true Otto!!
highly addictive ultra-processed what? Where’s the noun?
Ottokring said:
“If everything wasn’t so shit in the Modern World we wouldn’t all have to live on chocolate and booze to see us through it”
There’s a good line from JB Priestley, something like “first the government drives us to drink, then they increase alcohol taxes”.
if only we were better fed
Cattle are fed. Nice illustration of what the courageous state thinks of us….
It is my suggestion that this is exactly what Streeting has done. He has blamed NHS staff for the faults of the organisation they work for
How dare he suggest that faults in the NHS might have something to do with the people who run the NHS.
@Steve
So is His Spudness saying that the faults of the NHS are not due to the staff, so must be inherent in its premise? While that’s something I’ve said for a long time and I expect most on here would agree with, it’s not something that I would have expected as an an Emanation from Ely.
Matt – he’s saying the NHS is perfect, and candidly, private sector saboteurs and wreckers are to blame for any imperfections.
I’m three weeks into a 48-week wait for a diagnosis. If I can be treated that’ll be another wait. They won’t even talk to me. It’s reminiscent of waiting for a phone when it was in the control of the GPO. State monopolies are shit.
To quote from the Film ‘Blue Velvet’ – ‘Let’s hit the fucking Road’ – hopefully the editor has lifted the prohibition on ill-will toward Murphy but here we go:
Wes Streeting has taken to saying things like ‘The NHS is broken’.
A rare statement on which there seems to be general consensus across the political spectrum.
He does not say this is all the fault of Tory underfunding, although there are some swipes in that direction.
The Conservatives presided over a huge, ringfenced increase in expenditure on health. Money which we didn’t , and don’t have, despite your ridiculous philosophy that money can simply be created in the absence of accompanying goods and services without inflationary impact.
Instead, what he implies is that this is the result of the failure of NHS management and staff to increase their productivity. He hints, as a consequence, that increased productivity will be expected of them in the future.
Anyone who has experience the UK health system and almost any equivalent will know the productivity is at best ‘erratic’ and at worst highly questionable. There are myriad causes behind this so let’s get to his assessment,
He never notes that the bottlenecks preventing such things from happening are almost wholly beyond NHS control.
If you own the hospitals and the staff and there are bottlenecks how is , at the very least, the diagnosis of those ‘outside control’?
Those external factors include the chronic underfunding of social care so that people cannot be safely discharged from hospitals
Underfunding which probably won’t be helped by stealing everyone’s savings and spunking trillions on unfunded public Sector pensions but let’s not go down that road, shall we?
and the massive health problems created simultaneously by big sugar that wants to drive the UK population into ill health through vast over-consumption of highly addictive ultra-processed
You missed ‘food’ – and of course these people are forced to consume such product, despite millions of pounds being spent on healthy eating campaigns and ‘five a day’ co-ordinators (among other non-jobs held by Muslim block, Green and Labour voters exclusively – all with inflation linked final salary pension schemes unobtainable in the private sector) – perhaps we ought to conclude the latter are entirely ineffective and take the funding back for treatment?
and big pharma that wishes to over-medicalise the resulting conditions
Says the man who supported compulsory COVID death shot vaccination and the imprisonment of anyone who refused it
without pointing out that many of them are treatable or preventable if only we were better fed and drank less, neither of which is almost ever mentioned by a politician seeking to retain favour with both such groups.
I wish the politicians were less in hock to the public health lobby but that isn’t the case. Why are we the only country in the world to be pursuing a ban on smoking. What other countries have a ‘sugar tax?? the contention that the UK, in any area, including public health is ‘underegulated’ should qualify anyone making it for permanent institutionalization.
the result is that, as the FT notes:
The UK is facing a worrying fall in applications by mature students to study strategically vital professions such as nursing and teaching, the head of the country’s university admissions service has warned.
Jo Saxton, UCAS chief executive, said ahead of the release of A-level and BTec results on Thursday that while university applications from 18-year-olds were the second highest on record, the mature student market was struggling.
“The bit that concerns me is the decline in applications from mature students and, particularly, interest from that cohort in the kinds of courses that the nation really needs more of — so anything healthcare-aligned, nursing in particular, and teaching,” Saxton told a webinar organised by the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank on Tuesday.
And, we need such applications: they provide the highest-quality admissions to these professions. So, the question is, why is that?
The NHS is already the third largest employer in the world – but they need yet more!!!
There are two obvious answers. One is the underfunding in both services, but especially the NHS, knowledge of which is now widespread, and about which it is clear Streeting intends to do nothing of consequence.
The chance to amend the health system to one in line with EU countries is a rare example of the EU in this case being wrong. Hence why someone like Murphy never mentions it.
The other is that I think Streeting has done what is called a ‘Ratner’. This is named after an event in 1991 when Gerald Ratner, the then CEO of his eponymously named jewellery chain, said to a conference of the Institute of Directors:
We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap.”
Overnight he destroyed the credibility of his business by suggesting what it was selling was worthless. That is what careless, throwaway comments by bosses that undermine the efforts of those who work for them do.
It is my suggestion that this is exactly what Streeting has done. He has blamed NHS staff for the faults of the organisation they work for, very few, if any, of which have anything to do with them.
The interesting thing is there is a kernel of truth in this – endless reorganizations and incompetent management and Unions were a toxic combination throughout the halcyon days (at least for Murphy) of the ‘pre-neoliberal’ era in almost every nationalized industry. As the Peerless Rhoda Klapp notes – state monopolies provision of service is invariably garbage. Hence perhaps an alternative approach is needed, not merely throwing endless good money after bad.
He can obviously do that: it is within his rights. But it is also exceptionally unwise. People do not want to work for organisations that blame them for failings that are not their responsibility. They know they will be abused as a result: that attitude is built into the comment from the outset.
The appeal of an undervalued and undermined NHS, which is the consequence of its treatment by successive governments, is failing when it comes to staff recruitment. Wes Streeting should think before commenting again, but I doubt he will. It’s almost as if he has another agenda.
Again here he’s correct to a degree – NHS workers do feel undervalued (despite the weekly clap in the COVID era) – but I am guessing that’s a combination of many things. Having to deal with endless waves of people unable to speak English with no gratitude for the entirely free services they receive would wear down the bravest of us – but of course for Murphy ‘Migration is an unalloyed good’ so we can;t entertain such a thought.
Pure polemicism – from a man uniquely unqualified to opine on almost any topic he puts his mind to.
rhoda,
Postcode lottery. My latest PSA blood test just over 3 weeks ago was higher than the level they’d flagged and I have a scan this afternoon.
No doubt Labour will now do everything in its power to correct this postcode lottery and our service will be reduced to match yours.
V_P, that young Wes has posted some very interesting tweets (or whatever they are called now) on ‘X’ calling for, amongst other things, people with opinions of the type he disapproves of, being shot.
I wonder if he’ll be getting his door smashed in (ooh er…) by some burly plod any time soon?
Two things his ex-wife never called him: “Big” and “Sugar”.
jgh: I think it’s Newspeak. Ultrapro is foodcrime.
As Murphy points out, social care may well be underfunded. I would be tempted to take NHS budget and give it to social care. However when the NHS has people in hospital who could he discharged but for available convalescent or social care space, the NHS would then bill social care for not taking them out of hospital. They would of course bill them at the hospital care rate not the much cheaper social care rate. In the current “state” it would balance out and both would have exactly the same money. However every person social care pulls out of hospital would mean they get more funding. NHS wins too because it frees up hospital resources at zero net cost.
This is quite a fun thread on a subreddit:-
https://www.reddit.com/r/NursingUK/comments/1eregv1/what_was_the_biggest_waste_of_money_in_your_trust/
Some beauties:-
“We’ve had a brand new A&E built alongside a new SDEC. Reason? The big bosses in our trust said waiting times needed to be a certain time and we were WELL OVER… patients in a&e now go to SDEC which means it looks like our waiting time is 2.5 hours. A really shitty move and a massive waste of money.”
“Okay so the (COMMUNITY) trust I work at is good for this. They hired 15 AHPs (physio & OTs) from abroad paid for flights, accommodation for a couple months, paid HCPC registration etc. only to realise none of them drive.
They then hired a Band 3 driver for the clinicians & pay for mileage too. Because of car-sharing and distances they can only do half the work previously done & usually double up on visits.
So on the weekend they have a Band 6 (senior physio), Band 5 (physio) & Band 3 (driver) to complete, if lucky, three assessments.”
“Gave every staff member an IPad with the highest spec for work even though we already have a laptop and smart phone and we all said we didn’t need an IPad as well. But they went ahead with it anyway so we could look ‘forward thinking’. No one ever used theirs. We worked out roughly with every staff member in the trust it must have cost over a million easily.”
“I wanted batteries for our temperature monitors (pharmacy) it took a lot of very highly paid people and a 19 days(!!!!) long email chain to decide if we really needed temperature monitoring and were the batteries (£4.63) a necessary spend.”
“I was invited to meet with the ‘non accidental overdose senior clinical nurse specialist’. Her role was specifically within one council area (as a hospital we had 4), accepting referrals between 9-5, Monday to Friday by phone only for people with previous drug or alcohol concerns who had been admitted with non accidental overdose. They had no answer machine nor email/PMS referral, just call between office hours. Not ideal for their clientele who tend not to live a 9-5 lifestyle.
She was top band 7 full time and I asked how many referrals they received. In 6 months the service had received one referral and that was the only patient they had on their caseload. ”
“A bit late to the party but my biggest gripe around wasted money is having to print electronic documents just to send them to scanning so the document can be placed on to the electronic patient record. Make it make sense. Our home care prescriptions, every month, must consume an entire rainforest.”
Western Bloke:
“They had no answer machine nor email/PMS referral, just call between office hours.”
I live in Canada. My father had cancer (he passed away some years ago). He was in hospital and needed to tell his oncologist that he wouldn’t be able to make his appointment.
The oncologist had no phone, no email, only a fax. All business was done by fax.
Presumably because he only worked by referral, so all his business was with GPs. Who all had access to fax machines.
Eventually we managed to find a fax machine in the hospital and persuaded a nurse to allow us to use it.
Western Bloke: I’m convinced you could halve government spending overnight and nobody would notice. After all, Gordon Brown doubled health spending to no discernible effect.
If one subtracts official numbers of covid deaths from the total number of UK deaths for 2020 and 2021, the number of non-covid deaths is about the same as for 2018 and 2019.
So removal of a large part of the NHS during 2020 and 2021 seems to have made no noticeable difference to UK mortality. Replacement of medical services by nurses dancing in empty hospitals seems to have done the trick.
I might be prepared to listen to those who witter on about “ultra processed food” if they could define* what they’re talking about in a way that doesn’t include e.g. bread.
* “stuff I personally disapprove of” is not a definition for this purpose
Sam,
“ I’m convinced you could halve government spending overnight and nobody would notice. After all, Gordon Brown doubled health spending to no discernible effect.”
I take you’re point but as we know well, we’ll notice from day 0 because it will be front line services that go not diversity managers.
Envy…
“If one subtracts official numbers of covid deaths from the total number of UK deaths for 2020 and 2021, the number of non-covid deaths is about the same as for 2018 and 2019”
Except most of them didn’t die from but with Covid so you can’t subtract them
@ Steve
I rarely agree with you but …
I live a stone’s throw from a NHS facility that deals with people with mental health problems. Someone asked me whether we had problems fron the patients – the answer was “None” all our problems are with the management of that facility
@ Emil
The calculation is – inevitably – more complicated than that. Some people died with covid who were going to die anyhow, some people died of something else because their immune systems and general health were deteriorated by covid and they would not have died in the absence of the pandemic. Also the number of those reported as dying from covid is not the same as those dying “with covid” just as the number dying from prostate cancer is less than half of those dying *with* prostate cancer.
The first approximation is to subtract those reported as dying from covid
If I need a prescription from my GP , I can ring reception and have it sent to my phone in a couple of hours, then scanned at my Pharmasist. No idea if you have this in the UK, but Australia has had this for ages. Interested to know.
Emil – midazolam with your cocoa? Just a little more?
As my earlier comment and John77’s remarks imply, the empirical evidence from 2018-2021 is that – to a first approximation, using official figures – the presence or absence of the NHS seems to have little effect on everyday mortality. Perhaps it could be replaced by a placebo – a Potemkin NHS – saving £150B pa for the cost of a reassuring recorded message to say that the doctor will be with you shortly.
my biggest gripe around wasted money is having to print electronic documents just to send them to scanning so the document can be placed on to the electronic patient record
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more malignantly stupid.
Before , and occasionally after she retired, my wife was a Secretary to Consultants in various disciplines and she worked in several hospitals, so had a wide knowledge of the practices across the NHS. She would tell me of the goings on between staff and management and in almost every case, the difficulties were caused by the actions of management Most of them have no understanding of medical procedures and make little to no effort to learn what it is the staff are doing and why they need to perform that particular procedure.It also does not help that most of them appear to be infected by the Murphy virus and believe they are omnipotent.
No amount of money is going to cure this problem it will require a wholesale culling of the non medical senior staff to do it.
Jimintheantipodes,
My GP surgery with pharmacy is 20 to 30 minutes drive. When I need a prescription filling I go on line, tick the relevant boxes and leave a note asking for it to be delivered to our village shop.
A couple of days later I walk the 200yds to the shop and pick it up. Its been that way since we moved here 14 years ago.
And when we go on our travels we just ask for a double/triple order.-
Thanks BinND….your system looks OK, much better than what I expected, reading about your NHS. I have a couple of regular prescriptions have five “repeats” filed at my pharmasist so makes process very easy. Our health system is actually very good indeed,