Just What the Doctor Ordered!

The latest reorganisation of the NHS is being brought in despite the lack of a mandate, out of political ideology, regardless of what it will cost – at a time when we are supposed to be strapped for cash – and underwritten by the false premise that what people want is choice in healthcare.

Just taking the last point first, for once; when I collapsed last July with peritonitis, I wasn’t lying there thumbing through brochures from competing hospitals, comparing survival rates from major surgery, nor was I surfing on “Compare the Bedpan dot com”. I needed quick, effective and local treatment, and, fortunately for me, that is what I got.

Of course, to the Tories, freedom of choice is a political mantra, a shibboleth that needs to be pursued to the nth degree, even if it is totally unnecessary, inappropriate for the service in question, and results in a worse experience for the end user. See under railways, and see under (soon) the Post Office, unless they see sense and stop their efforts to sell chunks of it to Deutsche Post and the like. In fact, if they ever did succeed in their ultimate aim of privatising the air we breathe, they would probably still insist that people had the choice of breathing either air or Carbon Monoxide, and that it should be from a variety of different providers.

I have dealt before with the lack of a mandate. Cameron was at pains to say, before the election, that the NHS was safe in his hands. I don’t recall what the Literal Dimwit position on the NHS was, but then it didn’t matter at the time, because they were only ever going to get a sniff of power by abandoning everything they ever stood for. It’s just that at the time, none of us thought they would be venal and mercenary enough to actually go through with it. Personally, I don’t believe that any of this crap being foisted upon us has any sort of mandate – if it has, here’s my challenge to the ConDims. Publish what you have done so far, and what you plan to do, as a manifesto, and go to the country on it. And let’s see you get slaughtered.

So the idea is that GPs, in between looking at your bunions and saying “there’s a lot of it about”, will somehow find time to run the rest of the health service, from the bottom upwards (including Proctology, yes, let’s "pile" on the obvious jokes). The idea is plainly such bollocks that the only reason it has got this far is it seems to be Cameron’s own pet project. Even his own brother in law thinks it’s a non-starter. Clearly GPs aren’t going to be able to do all of this on their own, even if the receptionist does manage to fit in the odd bit of hospital management amongst her more normal tasks of glowering at people and refusing them appointments.

So they are going to have to hire some people to do it for them. And what better people than the people who were actually doing the job until recently, working for the Primary Health Trusts? So basically what you have done is sack one lot of health administrators, make them redundant, close their offices, and then pay for them to be taken on somewhere else and for new premises to be set up, with basically the same people doing the same job.

As an exercise in lunacy it ranks with King Louis paying people to dig holes in the road and then fill them in again, in the dying days of the Ancien Regime. And we all know what happened to him.