Nurses for Reform Blog

This irrelevant scaremongering nonsense is what we have come to expect from the Royal College of Nursing. It is designed to lead to the public to believe that 100,000 nursing jobs will be lost completely due to the Government spending cuts and healthcare reforms.

However, what is not taken in to account are the jobs for nurses that will be transferred to the private sector.  With reference to my previous post, I would suggest that we may see increased demand for nurses to work in many different healthcare settings.  As for the accusation that less nurses would be trained, surely the time has come for the state to lose its monopoly on nurse training and for us to see a plethora of new entrants to the nurse education market.

I am really pleased to see that David Cameron and Andrew Lansley are continuing to push ahead with their plans for NHS reform.

The realities of how the private sector will work with the NHS are now being explained and, in truth, they are just an extension of what has been before.

I remember when opticians were first allowed to see patients/customers in high street shops instead of NHS facilities.  There was a brouhaha about whether quality would be maintained.  Now none of us think of going to the NHS for our glasses or contact lenses.  Whether we go to SpecSavers, the internet any other of the competing brands, the people who have their eye care free at the point of delivery continue to do so and the rest of us get good quality eye care, a huge choice of frames and, most importantly, great value for money.

When I think back to the 1970s when children who wore NHS glasses were stuck with two choices for frames (horrible pink or blue plastic!) that always broke and were repaired with a sticking plaster, I am so pleased that that is now a distant memory. What I want to see in the near future is the evolution of other NHS services so that NHS customers can receive their healthcare in places that are convenient to them.  Where they don’t have to wait in overcrowded waiting rooms to be seen by doctors who behave as if the patients are an inconvenience and yes, if small, inefficient and poorly functioning NHS facilities are forced to close or are taken over by better performing providers this can only be for the good of the patient.

According to the UK press, this morning Prime Minister David Cameron will announce that many public services, including hospitals, will be run by independent companies, charities and mutual organisations.

For Nurses for Reform this is wonderful news, as regular readers of this blog will know, this is something that we have campaigned since our inception.

Mr Cameron has the future of the NHS in his hands and I urge him strongly not to drop the ball this time.  These reforms really are the only way to improve healthcare for NHS funded patients.

This story, that NHS waiting times will increase due to the government’s healthcare reforms, is blatant scaremongering by NHS managers.

Although it is true that NHS hospitals cannot cope with the demands placed upon them.  Since 2000, thanks to the historic concordat signed by Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, the NHS has been able to use the spare capacity of the UK’s independent healthcare sector to ensure that waiting times do not increase and availability of treatments is not compromised for NHS funded patients.

The time has really now come for many politicians, NHS managers, and clinicians to wake up to the fact the the NHS hospitals, in their current form, will never cope with demand.  It is expensive and does not provide the high standards of care that can be achieved elsewhere with better cost efficiency.