Local NHS Crisis

[mb1]

Thanks Scottman. I agree with all you say. That a corporation the size of Facebook can hide its assets and income from the tax man, and pay £4000 tax for the year is ludicrous. Others are just as bad. And you're right thst ee need political parties to be straight and say what it will cost to run a well maintained and stably financed NHS.

[Pat-H]

Scary stuff ...

Three in four NHS hospitals are failing, says watchdog

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/119 ... chdog.html

But failing by what measure?

We set a limit on your spending. We reduce services elsewhere and expect the NHS to pick up the slack.
We demand faster responses to an aging population.
The NHS is doomed to fail unless the goal posts are moved.
The Tories want an NHS but as a vehicle for private enterprise to profit from. For that to happen it has to fail first.
The Tories have always wanted to reduce the size of the state. A noble cause to reduce the costs to the country, reduce the taxes people have to pay.
The NHS is one of the biggest state burdens. In the Tory model it has to go.

And as for the national debt clock. That's with the Tories in charge. A lot of economists here and elsewhere don't agree that the current cuts are the way to solve the problem.
Less jobs, less opportunities, more 0 hour contracts.

[Matt40]

I know very little about the nhs situation. The only facts that seem to stick in my mind are that we appear to have private sector companies charging the nhs absurdly high amounts for their services, GPs that complain they have to work lots of hours and yet a few years back were absolutely rolling in cash when they started to run their own surgeries and lastly it seems to me that regardless how much money we throw at the nhs it seems to absorb it to the point that it just becomes a political football. Whether we are actually getting VFM i havent a clue!

[Blueboy]

....to my mind, those people with the purse strings are only paying those that don't have vocational but administrative jobs within the service.....

I'm sorry, I know what I am about to say isn't directly related to the original post but my wife is in an administrative role in the NHS. During the last Labour government she was forcibly down graded as part of a cost cutting exercise. Years later her hospital admitted they were wrong to have done this and reinstated her in her old grade but of course wouldn't give her any back pay. No sooner was she back in her proper grade however than the 1% limit on pay came in. Meanwhile her team of up to six people has slowly been reduced so that now there is just her and one other. Being a conscientious person she works long hours, was off sick recently but continued to do her work from home because "otherwise there would just be more to do when I go back", rarely takes leave and if she does have a day off I can guarantee that she won't get in before midnight because she has stayed to do as much as possible of the work due on her leave day. The net result is she is too tired to enjoy the day off. Yes, the NHS is in trouble and it isn't just the clinical staff who are suffering.

[Mancunian]

Yes Blueboy what you say is very true indeed, i'm also in corporate not front line and it's not just clinical staff who are getting the heave ho. i was in a team of 9 who were stretched to say the least given the size and geographical scale of out trust (we cover a third of London = about roughly 230 sites, we have teams in 17 prisons and provide services in immigration centers up and down the country. My team is now down to 4 and we are really struggling given the workload. In respect of third parties running services and costing a fortune i have a little example of this, my remit is Records Management and compliance which basically means i'm responsible for Patient records as such, one of the area's i focused on was the offsite situation, when i came to my trust we were using at least 14 different suppliers who held records on behalf of services and charged various amounts to do so. One such company was charging nearly £3 a box per month to store. this may seem a little but given the number of records this was a huge monthly cost, I centralized the whole lot so one company does all and now have a price of 13p per box per month. These company's in the past saw the NHS and thought whey hey they have money lets charge them stupid amounts. The NHS didn't really see what they were doing and went ahead with things they really should not have done and people like me are now trying to sort out a mess we didn't create. This is also now what is happening throughout the NHS where costs are being brought under control but at a cost to staff as well as services.

sorry peeps for the rant...

[Blueboy]

I would happily pay more tax for a decent service (though I accept that throwing money at the problem is wrong, it needs to be focussed application of tax money) but we are in an era where taxation is seen as something terrible that governments do to the population rather than as a resource for things we need.