He said: “Our 10-year health plan will deliver three big shifts in the focus of healthcare from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. We will refresh the NHS workforce plan to fit the transformed health service we will build over the next decade, so the NHS has the staff it needs to treat patients on time again.”
Last year, health officials drew up a strategy – which would have seen a 49 per cent increase in hospital consultants by 2036 – but just 4 per cent more GPs.
Now, they will be told to “refresh” the plan to tip the balance in favour of services closer to home, meaning far more GPs, health visitors and community nurses trained and hired.
As I keep pointing out about the place GP training has been in the hands of govt for 80 years now. And they’ve not even been able to process really simple stuff – like the feminisation of the profession will lead to fewer working hours per GP trained.
That’s just one of the problems with government plans. Governments aren’t very good at planning.
“…so the NHS has the staff it needs to treat patients on time again.”
Again? When did the NHS ever treat patients on time? Waiting lists have been a part of life for as long as I can remember. I can remember there being discussions about hospital waiting lists at work in the early 1980s.
There will always be waiting lists
If there were none there would be parts of the NHS waiting for things to happen
The triage process generates a waiting list
It’s inevitable, the key is to make it a short one
I can remember there being discussions about hospital waiting lists at work in the early 1980s.
We had a Conservative government them and what’s more headed by the hated Thatcher so of course waiting lists were important.
Never forget, the role of the NHS is to be a political cudgel to beat the Tories.
“three big shifts in the focus of healthcare from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. ”
Hospital to Community: just like in the Days of Yore, when Britannia Ruled the Waves, etc..
Back to the Iron Age with you!!
( Even the medieval period had better care, what there was, through Monasteries and Alm/Guild funded hospices. That indulgence-driven culture had some surprisingly ….caring… aspects.. )
Analogue to Digital: What is this, the 1980’s?!!! What the actual hell?
Sickness to Prevention: You vill eat your State-Approved bugz, and praize our NHS, Citizen!!
…so the NHS has the staff it needs to treat patients on time again.”
How many of the new staff will be bureaucrats & DEI wankers?
Well, aisiaseen, it’s just a wild guess from a far right bigot, you understand, but I think it could be as low as 100%…
Weird moderation going on? Posted a couple of messages on this thread that don’t seem to get through.
Does this work?
http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a748
Hm, it does.
Anyway, see link above as to why we don’t have enough of our own doctors without stealing them from the 3rd world.
Spoiler – it’s the BMA and government to blame.
shifts in the focus of healthcare from hospital to community
We all know well care in the community worked out.
The NHS has to have waiting lists, or it wouldn’t get increased funding. Its incentive is to make waiting lists longer. If it ever reduced them, it would get less money.
Re waiting lists. My wife’s GP just put in an urgent referral to a specialist for her. She got given a hospital appointment three days later. Unfortunately the appointment is for late April, 20 weeks off.
the feminisation of the profession will lead to fewer working hours per GP trained.
Thing is, no-one is supposed to notice or discuss this. You can’t plan for things you’re not supposed to notice or discuss. If this consequence of the feminisation of the profession were to be acknowledged, it would have to lead directly to the admission that this policy leads to a more costly and less efficient health service.
This directly undermines the Progressive Project and we can’t be having that. It’s even more fundamental than Diversity is Strength.
I wonder when they’re going to stop fiddling with planning and start executing.
I suppose that might result in the money flow to consultants drying up. Or at least the money flow going to different consultants when the execution goes wrong.
Until the New Plan is drawn up nothing in the Old Plan can be implemented in case it conflicts with the new plan.
And so planning becomes a substitute for action.
Yep:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-nhs-as-an-elegant-exposition-of-the-failure-of-government
My wife’s GP just put in an urgent referral to a specialist for her. She got given a hospital appointment three days later. Unfortunately the appointment is for late April, 20 weeks off.
It would be interesting for AtC to update us on that one. An appointment is not the same as the service enjoyed in the appointment. It’s simply an entry in a calender costs virtually nothing is worth less. 20 weeks is some considerable time away. It’ll be worth knowing what happens in the intervening weeks & in the appointment itself ( if it occurs). A system that produces appointments is not the same as a system that produces results.
A bit of queuing theory. A queue is something that smooths the input to a valued service. So it increases efficiency & thus value & can be justified. But only to the extent that it increases efficiency. Past that. it decreases efficiency due the time lost to people queueing. Any stable length queue must be intentional. If a queue is necessary to smooth input, then the queue should shorten & lengthen according to the volume of the input. It can shrink to zero or rise to infinity. But the one thing it can’t be is a stable duration. That takes managing. Removing resources to lengthen it, adding resources to diminish it. An intentional dynamic process. Just so you know what they’re doing to you.
It’s worth noting that most private sector businesses try to work on minus number queue lengths. In other words the service providers are queueing to provide the service. They can’t afford people to opt not to join a queue so they try to keep queues to minimum length. A lengthening queue is a signal to increase capacity & thus profits. But the NHS isn’t a profit making business, is it? The optimum number of patients for any NHS facility is zero.
It’s weird how everybody says they love the NHS but if any of them are asked they’ll relate a tale of when it utterly failed them. That’s some effective propaganda.
They also believe that no other system could be better, though the only one they’ve heard of is the USA, which the media regularly scares them with.
Arthur the Cat said:
“My wife’s GP just put in an urgent referral to a specialist for her. She got given a hospital appointment three days later. Unfortunately the appointment is for late April, 20 weeks off.”
Let me guess – 31st?
@BiS: “An appointment is not the same as the service enjoyed in the appointment.”
Tell me about it. Three years ago I had an urgent referral to a cardiologist. Heard nothing for 5 months, finally got an appointment scheduled for 2 months later. That was cancelled twice, pushed back around a month each time. When I finally saw the cardio he said he’d admit me, but the normal admission process was taking more than 2 months and he wanted me treated asap, so told me to go to A&E. Spent a mere 24 hours in A&E before being admitted to a general emergency ward where I spent a week before finally getting moved to a cardio ward. Only at this point did they read the notes that said I should have been on 24 hour ECG. Finally arrived in the cath lab 3 days after that.
“analogue to digital”
They know that the human body isn’t digital, right?
and sickness to prevention.
The National Elf was originally sold to the public, nearly 80 years ago, as being self-funding because it would concentrate on prevention. The country would become so gosh-darned healthy that we wouldn’t even need all those doctors any more.
“It’s weird how everybody says they love the NHS but if any of them are asked they’ll relate a tale of when it utterly failed them. That’s some effective propaganda.”
“I’d be dead without the NHS, you know”. No, you’d be dead without medicine. You’d probably be a damned sight better off without the NHS …
“They also believe that no other system could be better, though the only one they’ve heard of is the USA, which the media regularly scares them with.”
… yes, exactly. There are more than two ways to skin a cat. Toppling the Stalinist leviathan doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll suddenly be landed with a massive bill you can’t afford. What amazes me is that there’s a tiny corner of our healthcare industry that works extremely well: opticians. They basically operate on “the French model” – you get a bill and if you qualify, the taxpayer helps you out – and yet when you suggest that it might be a better way of running the whole thing, people nearly have kittens. It’s bizarre.
Even more bizarre is that those kittens most likely have private health insurance – and therefore better health care than their humans.
What amazes me is that there’s a tiny corner of our healthcare industry that works extremely well: opticians. They basically operate on “the French model” – you get a bill and if you qualify, the taxpayer helps you out – and yet when you suggest that it might be a better way of running the whole thing, people nearly have kittens.
Most dentists (the non-NHS ones), too.
I almost mentioned dentists but hesitated because you’ll always get someone moaning about being unable to find an NHS one. But yes, the system basically works and “private” ones aren’t nearly as terrifying as people like to think.
(I succumbed to the siren song of the National Elf a few years back after I was stung with a £600 bill for a crown, but I was seriously strapped for cash at the time. I’d been with the same practice for nearly 30 years, even during extended periods of unemployment. Generally, if you look after your teeth and don’t need any serious work done, they’re not massively more expensive. And a lot more pleasant to deal with.)