Is The NHS A Religion?
David Prior set the cat among the pigeons with his article in the Daily Telegraph, which was entitled, NHS on brink of crisis because it became ‘too powerful’ to criticise. It’s all reported here on the BBC, with this being the opening shot.
The NHS “became too powerful to criticise” despite many patients receiving a “wholly unsatisfactory” service, the health regulator has said.
David Prior told the Daily Telegraph that even the most senior staff were afraid of speaking out.
The Care Quality Commission chairman said the NHS should not be treated as a “national religion” beyond criticism.
You have two camps and I meet both amongst my friends.
One group trust it totally for everything and the others pay for expensive health insurance and except for their GP don’t go near the organisation.
I’m in another category. I don’t have health insurance, but if say I needed surgery immediately, I’d probably pay for itself myself. I would also make sure, I went to the best quack I could find.
I would not have any quick solutions, except that the first thing we must do is to decouple the NHS from national politics. Some NHS Trusts are big enough to be companies, that would be in the FTSE300. So politicians and the great and good, should have nothing to do with them!
Because we let politicians meddle we get some of the disasters we’ve had in the past few years.
I would do a few things to make it better for everybody.
My GP and his team are in my opinion pretty good and up-to-date and work out of well-equipped modern premises. I would make absolutely sure that all GPs were up to scratch and some of the dreadful ones that I know exist should be given marching orders.
Perhaps making it easier to change GPs would help. It’s quite easy here in London, but if you have only one terrible rural practice and don’t drive, what do you do.
We also need a universal health database, that all doctors, hospitals and patients can access.
But we as patients have responsibilities.
If we are overweight, smoke and drink heavily can we rightly affect a First Class service? Suppose you had an expensive car and constantly put dents in it because of bad driving, would you expect your insurance company to pay for the repairs? Probably not! So why should your body be treated any different?
And then there’s the insistence of many, that they want the best treatment from their local hospital and if they need a difficult procedure, they refuse to travel to the next area, to get the best specialist.
Try and close an A & E unit and see what happens. Some years ago, there was a big fuss when the unit at Newmarket was closed. But what happens now? The paramedics get patients to either Addenbrookes or the West Suffolk and you never hear of any complaints now!
Patients if asked, would probably say they needed an Air Ambulance at their local hospital, but we seem to work well with a limited number.
We need better systems that work for all! Not Rolls Royce systems working at a low level, which may well be what some countries have!
The NHS has responsibilities too!
It should have a complaints system that works, so that problems such as we’ve seen in the last year or so are spotted earlier. We have the successful CHIRP system for flying and shipping, So where is the NHS version?
As NHS Trusts are in fact large public companies, with just one shareholder, they should be run as such, responsibly, ethically and to proper financial rules and standards. And just as companies like Blockbuster, Peacocks and Jessops went bust, they should be allowed to fail.
And when they do fail, we get the unedifying spectacle of those who’d criticised say the bad care from their local hospital, fighting to keep it open. They should have started kicking earlier, so that the problems were solved years before.
I used to live near Chase Farm Hospital and my younger sister was actually born there. In the 1950s it was a dreadful hospital and everybody who could, went to London, as the other hospitals in the area weren’t much better. When I read reports of the hospital now, it doesn’t seemed to have improved much. But still the locals fight to keep it open, rather than improve the care in the area.
Should not in London the hospitals in a particular borough be controlled by the local council? London has a wonderful transport system and one of the reasons is that transport is the direct responsibility of the Mayor and they either get it right or voted out.
I can’t think of a reason, why each local authority, shouldn’t control, at least the major hospital in its area. Quality and performance would of course be monitored centrally.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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