Wednesday 11 January 2017

NHS Questions

Finally, Jeremy Corbyn had a good PMQ's today. He managed to focus on the NHS and the Government, as every Government seems too, looked a bit wobbly.


I have 3 questions to pose....


How much extra money has been spent on the NHS since 2010?


How many extra appointments are now needed in addition to service levels 2010?


How many immigrants has the country allowed in since 2010?


I only say google yourselves because my light research was fairly stark in its answer and yet I am sure just asking these questions condemns me to the alt-right loony bin in the eyes of many....

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

The NHS has plenty of cash, as ever it's bad allocation. Managers getting 6 figure payoffs then starting a new NHS role 6 months later. Money hushing whistleblowers. A preference for management to have shiny toys rather than fund services. Crushingly bad project management. Car crash IT projects.

The list is endless. It's not just Hunt, none of his predecessors have felt inclined to tackle those issues either.

Anonymous said...

Plus the women-isation of management grades, whose primary concern is to ensure Work-Life Balance FOR THE STAFF, aka everyone getting time off all year round for 'family reasons', plus whole years off to expand said family.

dustybloke said...

I've been getting my money's worth from the NHS over the last couple of years.

As an initial anecdotal post, when I was in the bloods waiting room at St Thomas recently, I noticed that of the 37 other patients and their friends, nobody was speaking English.

During a two week period when I had to get a taxi from Charing Cross,
three cab drivers, 2 male, 1 female, regaled me of stories of persons presenting them with pieces of paper with the name of a doctor and the name of the hospital scrawled on it.

I draw no conclusions. It's probably illegal to do so.

Electro-Kevin said...

It doesn't help that £1.5bn is leeching away from the NHS in no-win-no-fee payouts.

CityUnslicker said...

1.5b only around 1%.

The NHS is screwed, I hope online men's and doctors stay cheap; privatisation may happen by default rather than purpose.

Anonymous said...

Good post, great comments and can you read my mind CU?

"privatisation may happen by default rather than purpose."

I was musing on the behemoth that is NHS, a monstrously bad public sector institution and arrived at the above quoted conclusion. Inevitably, the NHS, it will crash under the weight of its own gross, institutionalized incompetence, arcane procedures and untold and sometimes deliberate malfeasance to which unionization dictates and ill judged malpractice.

People will not put up with it much longer but will put up their oomph, fueled not only by disgust but also distrust and invest money where their mouth is and private hospitals will be manifested purely through public demand. imho, France has a pretty workable system, as do the Germans, so be it, anything is better than the current one size kills all mess.

That is, if the UK public ever recover, should I say wake up from the drip feed and morphine induced coma of NHS propaganda the media blanket feeds them and in any case, isn't it time the doctors actually served the patients, and not the other way around?

Raedwald said...

Austrian GPs are self-employed, paid post hoc per transaction by the big social insurance providers, so a qualified practitioner can hang his shingle anywhere he thinks he can do business. Patients can take their e-card and their business to any GP they choose - there are no fixed catchments or registrations.

The upside is that a sole practitioner can run a local practice anywhere with just a medical receptionist (with a pile of blank pre-signed prescriptions for repeat trade) in a rented commercial suite. It will be efficient as he has to pay the costs himself.

The downside is that a busy and popular Arzt can take loads of holidays - and they don't use locums here. My young fellow is away playing about 25% of the time and if I miss him I have to take my e-card down to the semi-retired old buffer three miles down the road or wait .. so most folk here keep a close eye on his regular advance holiday announcements.

Gordon the Fence Post Tortoise said...

This morning I idly took a look at The Register for an overview/insight of sorts into NHS IT after seeing a claim that every click on the NHS web site costs £0.46.

1300 hits on a search for "NHS" - and some bizarre and depressing reading....

Anonymous said...

Makes you wonder how Iceland (pop 300,000) manages.

"Healthcare in Iceland is universal. The healthcare system is largely paid for by taxes (85%) and to some extent by service fees (15%) and is administrated by the Ministry of Welfare. A considerable portion of government spending is assigned to health care. There is almost no private health insurance in Iceland and no private hospitals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Iceland

The more I visit and learn about that country the more impressed I am. Despite the fact that it's essentially open to all EU residents the weather and darkness means it's avoided the fate of Norway (see East Oslo) and Sweden (see Malmo), and still has a national rather than international health service.

Their weather website is IMHO better than the BBCs if you want to see what's coming in off the Atlantic. And they do it all with a population the size of Cardiff or Coventry.

http://en.vedur.is/weather/shipping/atlantic/#type=temp

Blue Eyes said...

We need better triage. If people are going to A&E because they can't or won't go to their GP then maybe the A&E departments should have some GPs located in the same place so they can work in tandem.

Plus more walk-in GP clinics maybe.

My most recent experience of the NHS was of a very long delay to be seen but when I did the service was excellent. That is the best one can hope for in a free-to-use service.

Anonymous said...

I see a woman has died in the US from a bug resistant to all known antibiotics. She'd been in India, where antibiotics (not to mention drugs like Viagra) are freely available over the counter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/13/us-woman-killed-superbug-resistant-every-available-antibiotic/