Nurses for Reform Blog

I have been reading the Public Health White Paper, Health Lives Healthy People: Our Strategy for Public Health in England.

The paper makes much in its introduction of wanting to move away from the Nanny State model of public health management.  A paragraph states:

The dilemma for government is this: it is simply not possible to promote healthier lifestyles through Whitehall diktat and nannying about the way people should live. Recent years have proved that one- size-fits-all solutions are no good when public health challenges vary from one neighbourhood to the next.

However, it then goes on for the next 96 pages to tell us why and how by, Whitehall diktat, local authorities, businesses and voluntary organizations are going to implement the nannying agenda for them.

Another thing that I find amazing in this paper is the way that smoking is addressed in the Executive Summary between mental health and some infectious diseases, as if the choice to smoke is an illness to be cured.

Increasingly, people do not trust government, nowhere was this more evident than the debacle over the MMR vaccination.  Also, when there is conflicting advice over the number of portions of vegetables we should eat, how much wine we should or should not drink and whether or not butter is good for us, how on earth does the Department of Health think that the public will take its prescriptive initiatives seriously?

Finally, I would strongly suggest to the Department of Health, that it is time to separate national issues such as the management of pandemic influenza, for which I concede that there is a role for government, from life style choice issues which will only be addressed when we have health and welfare systems that promote personal responsibility rather than promising everything to everyone.

How much longer will it take for politicians to realise that consumer groups for healthcare will not work if they are developed top down by government organisations?

We have already seen the failure of Community Health Councils, bodies that were supposed to monitor NHS services and give patients a voice.  In fact they were run by a few individuals, usually with their own agenda and axes to grind, ignoring the interests of most patients and were closed down in 2003.  There have also been Local Involvement Networks (LINks) since 2008, that appear to have little effect and remain a mystery to most people.  Now the Department of Health is establishing Local Healthwatch Organisations, which I believe will go the same way as their predecessors.

Only when there is a real market in healthcare will consumer-led organisations flourish and be trusted by users of healthcare services.

A report released early this month by a committee of MPs has shown the the NHS Electronic Patient Record Project (EPR) has cost billions of pounds and been a complete waste of time, failing on every count.

The project is being abandoned and individual Trusts are now expected to develop their own record keeping systems.

Thank goodness that the MPs have seen sense and stopped this project before more good money is thrown after bad.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I have never been a fan of EPR and wrote this paper with my husband back in 2001.

This is an interesting story that has been picked up by both the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.  Due to traumatic experiences or poor service, more and more mothers are opting to pay privately for maternity care rather than risk having their babies in NHS hospitals.

I am aware that at these stories are about middle class people, but it was not so long ago that private maternity care was the preserve of the very rich.  I feel sure that as increasing numbers of mothers become disillusioned with the care offered by the NHS, heightened demand will bring down the cost of maternity care and competition will continue to drive the quality of the independent sector.  Hopefully, it will not be long before these better services are available to all and reform of midwifery services will continue to be market and customer led rather than waiting for the politicians to catch up.

The summer holidays are a great time to catch up with reading and this is one publication that I highly recommend.

Titled No need to flinch: The need for NHS reform, it is written by Miles Saltiel and published by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI).  It gives an in depth analysis of the NHS using World Health Organisation data as is described as follows on the ASI webiste;

This paper, which analyzes World Health Organization data, suggests that the NHS fails to distinguish itself on either health outcomes or value for money – when ranked against similar countries, the UK is in the lower half of both league tables. Even more depressing are the findings of the annual Euro-Canada Health Consumer Index, which ranks the UK 15th out of 18 Western European countries in terms of healthcare performance from the perspective of the consumer. Such findings surely make it hard to keep insisting that the NHS is ‘the envy of the world’.

Yesterday my family attended the Portsmouth Lifeboat Station Open Day.

The reason that I mention this on my health care blog is that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is an independent charity that takes no funding from Government.

It is staffed by volunteers and provides a high quality, life saving service day and night, year round.  Government and the NHS could learn a lot from it and I urge all readers of this blog and supporters of Nurses for Reform to support their local Lifeboat Services.