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You
have done it yourself Mr Blair. 09/01/2006,
20:05
Granted you have greatly increased the spending in the NHS, for
which you are to be commended, even if it is self praise.
Correct, there were decades of prior underfunding to be overcome.
The problem of "where has the money gone?" is one of
your making.
Had you just put the money in and allowed clinicians to work with
greater resource, things would have been better but you chose not
to do that.
You decided that a new contract was to be arranged to get the
"workshy" consultants to increase their workload from
30/35 hours a week to 45. It turned out they worked an average of
53 hours a week. Oops.
You decided to Offer an expansion of the professional development
of nurses, for which you should be commended. However you forgot
to value ward based nurses and now wonder why they go for more
lucrative, less time consuming jobs and leave a ward based
staffing shortage. A forgivable oversight
You offer patient choice, yet instead of GPs being able to refer
to any chosen hospital, there is now a limited number of referral
centres, sometimes these letters even get placed in a central
holding system to be allocated a hospital of designation,
irrespective of the subspecialist interest of the particular
clinician. Well, you can't win them all.
You created new medical school places and expanded consultant
numbers allowing more "hands on deck" to do the work,
yet you forgot that an operation requires a theatre, fully staffed
and equipped and a patient has to be found from an outpatient
clinic. Well that could not have been foreseen in advance.
You wanted good hospitals to be recognised and a star system came
into existence. Unfortunately this costly enterprise meant that
arbitrary targets were met at the expense of more relevant
clinical ones.
You hoped that basic care and infection control would be
priorities, yet you spent some more money on hospital art
galleries.
You wanted to reduce waiting lists, so you got regional health
trust managers under pressure to fudge them until that fudge was
rumbled, it bought you time but no results, so you set up
"waiting list initiatives" at great cost, either locally
or at expensive private centres.
You demanded that things be accountable and the GMC colluded so
doctors now have to make job plans and meet point scoring criteria
for NON CLINICAL work. This failed to take into account the fact
that if doctors don't do doctors work, it cannot get magically
done by others.
All these initiatives have counteracted your noble investment,
they have been instigated, at great cost, by your government, yet
you ask "where has the money gone?"
Soon there will be no more money left, even for the spin doctors,
then the whole ethos of CENTRAL CONTROL, LOCAL BLAME will be
exposed for what it is.
I guess the down side of being PM is that that buck, once placed
on your lap, may prove hard to pass. Or is that what Mrs Hewitt's
head is for.
The contents wont be missed.
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 589 colleagues voted this a quality posting. |
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(12/1/06)
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