HEALTH MATTERS

[Stanley]

HEALTH MATTERS

26 January 2006

There has been a leak, I can’t remember the name of the hospital but documents were leaked including a memo from the CEO directing that all non-emergency surgery scheduled after November 1st last year should be postponed until after March 1st. This was immediately followed by a denial of any ban from the CEO and an appearance by the Patroniser-in-Chief Patricia Hewitt on this morning’s Today programme on R4. She gave us the usual spiel that all was well in the best of all possible worlds. Then there was an email to the programme from a consultant at the hospital stating that the original report was quite accurate, there was a ban and operations were being postponed resulting in theatres standing idle while staff were of course still on full pay.
It’s the usual scuttle-butt but has a ring of truth about it. We have become so used to obfuscation of facts and spin for short-term advantage that we almost take this sort of thing for granted. However, it triggered off a memory.
How many of you have read ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties’ By Dr Charles Webster? (See the copy on our web site Oneguyfrombarlick.) Don’t worry, this isn’t a test. In it Charles Webster was detailing evidence that in the inter-war years, by selective use of the statistics, the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Sir George Newman was giving a false impression of the health of the country by failing to report the sinks of deprivation and high infant mortality that existed in some areas. I can’t help thinking that there are elements of this going on here with this latest furore in the NHS.
At the root of the problem is the way the finances of the NHS are being administered. The government’s solution is to send in professional accountants to monitor expenditure in the worst performing trusts and advise the management on economies. My first reaction to this is that one wonders what the trust’s internal accounting officers have been up to, are they incompetent or handcuffed? Some reliable estimates point to the fact that two thirds of the extra money that has been injected into the NHS in the last three years has not gone on patient care but on pension funds, administration of changing roles and general management. All these extra expenditures are as a result of government policy, some might characterise this as government interference.
There’s not a lot of point in going on any further with this analysis. What can one pensioner sat in a kitchen do against the whole weight of the government? All I can do is flag up the fact that something is terribly wrong with the way the NHS is being run and I suspect that most of any good the service is doing is in spite of government interference, not as a result of government support.
26 January 2006