I HAVE
TO SAY THIS, as someone who has relied upon the NHS all his life…the NHS is not
the best healthcare system in the world. The Left would like to believe it, and
the Right are frightened to say anything different. The truth is that this
great leviathan is facing, within the next few decades, the same fate as the
dinosaur. Ever more expensive drugs and technology, coupled with an ageing
population as well as the social impact of immigration[1],
have all conspired to undermine the 'free at the point of need' philosophy so beloved
by liberals.
If this was not enough, we now have
the reputation of the NHS put under a
microscope by events at Mid Staffordshire NHS trust, and today by the
criminal attempt to cover up hospital negligence at Furness General Hospital in
Morecombe by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
This all comes on top of the Dr Foster
hospital guide in 2010 which exposed abnormally high death rates in 19 NHS
hospitals where, according to the Observer
newspaper; 'The Dr Foster hospital guide also revealed that tens of
thousands of patients were harmed in hospital when they developed avoidable
blood clots, suffered obstetric tears during childbirth, accidental lacerations
or puncture wounds, or post-surgery intestinal bleeding and blood poisoning'.
We have since had the spectacle of
the NHS spending £14.7 million on gagging whistleblowers. The Chief Executive
of the NHS (and one time member of the Communist Party), Sir David Nicholson
faced down demands (after presiding over the Mid Staffordshire scandal that
cost the lives of 1,200 patients) to resign immediately; which is of course not
in the nature of politicians, quangocrats or civil servants, unless, that is
there is a big taxpayer funded payoff and a generous pension.
But all that is wrong with NHS
cannot be put at the door of higher costs, an aging population, or immigration.
The service itself has been, to use a phrase associated with broadcasting, 'dumbed
down'.
WHEN
BLAIR CAME TO POWER, he set about seeking to reform the NHS. He started by
offering a multi billion pound carrot; investment in the NHS with the proviso
that what he saw as modernisation took place. In the end, of the billions he
poured into the system, only a third found its way into patient care. The rest
went on staff at every level. His idea of modernisation was to elevate nursing
to a level where it could no longer be regarded as nursing in the true meaning
of the term.
Nurses were now to be given a
professional status with a better pay structure to match their new status. I
experienced what this meant, as I have been treated by traditional, as well as
post-Blair professional nurses. The Blair nurses no longer made beds, bed
bathed the patients, or emptied bed pans and bottles of urine. Instead a new
class of low paid healthcare worker was created to carry out these functions,
leaving the nurses to do …what?
When I was last in hospital, the
nursing staff took my blood pressure (something I now do myself on a regular
basis), my temperature, and delivered the drugs to my bed- side. A lower caste
of healthcare worker now provides the services the newly professionalised
nurses once use to do, but now squeeze their noses at ever reinstating.
Nursing meant just that. Nursing the
sick and the ill meant overseeing the patient's basic requirements, which they
no longer do…at least in any hospital I have been in after the Blair
revolution.
I HAVE
ALWWAYS BEEN grateful to the NHS for extending my life. However, there remains
another problem. A problem of incompetence, which relies upon the whistleblower
to bring it to the public's attention; but throughout the NHS all such
incompetence, if Sir David Nicholson had had is way, would never be made
public.
In Morecombe 14 babies and two
mothers died, and the former chief executive of the CQC at the time, Cynthia
Bower, was at the heart of the cover-up. When she resigned, she left with a
£1.35 million pension; and during her four and a half years in charge was given
a salary of £203,500.
Two of her underlings, Dame Jo
Williams, chairman, and Jill Finney, director of communications, were also given
generous settlements along with six others.
Every time a new government comes to
power they promise to pare down to a minimum the number of countless quangos,
such as the CQC. However these bodies come into their own as convenient
scapegoats for politicians when a scandal such as Mid Staffs and Morecombe
occur.
We can no longer continue to look
upon the NHS in the same way the Druids looked upon Stonehenge. Our sentimental
veneration of this institution, has allowed the staff and management to become
slipshod and negligent in too many cases now for the critics of the NHS to be
dismissed so casually as in the past - a more critical eye must now pass over
the NHS, and no option dismissed on ideological grounds for improving it before
it is too late.
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