Nurses for Reform Blog

Yesterday I was interviewed on the LBC lunch time show to comment on this story .  The head of the Royal College of Nursing, Dr Peter Carter, has been calling for family members of elderly patients on NHS hospital wards to help provide care, such as helping with eating and going to the toilet.

I made the made the point very strongly that this is not a problem of nurses not wanting to look after elderly patients. I know many, many dedicated, hard working nurses who are as appalled at this situation as the rest of us.

The reason we are in this crisis is because of the system that is the NHS.  Nurses for Reform has argued for a number of years that this is the inevitable conclusion of a system that has taken the tax payers money, promised the earth and been unable to deliver, and will continue to be unable to deliver.  Peter Carter knows this as do many of our politicians.

This move to have relatives working on the wards is simply privatisation from the inside out and it is not just happening in healthcare.  We are seeing it with the establishment of free schools and it won’t be long before something similar occurs with policing and other state provided services.

It is now time for the politicians of all parties to be honest with the british people.  The state cannot and never could do it all.  Before yet more people die unnecessarily in this failing system the Government must open up the planning laws to make it easier for new market entrants to build and run hospitals to care for NHS funded patients.  There must also be a return to the independent sector of all NHS hospitals so that NHS money goes only on the funding of patient care, not the propping up of the crumbling NHS estate.  Finally, the Government must allow Doctors, Nurses, Hospitals and Clinics to advertise their services as only by building up brands that are successful and trusted will Britain have a health service that is truly fit for the 21st Century.

I have long made the point that with reform of human services such as healthcare, generally, the public are way ahead of the Government and the Media.  I have also been expecting the market to react accordingly.

Yesterday my patience was rewarded.  I received an email from Argos linking to this website, it advertises low cost healthcare insurance and offers purchasers a speedy service, privacy, flexibility and no waiting lists.  While the politicians are busy ringing their hands and continue to extol the virtues of the NHS, the people are taking things in to their own hands and looking after their families themselves.

This story from today’s Daily Telegraph demonstrates clearly why the NHS cannot and must not be allowed to carry on in its current guise.

Primary Care Trusts (PCT) are apparently asking NHS hospitals to delay seeing patients for many weeks to ration healthcare, enable the fiddling of the balance sheet and lower expectations of the service.

I think that is it fair to say that most people now have pretty low expectations of the NHS, especially when we see stories of NHS failure such as this and rationing such as this!

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.

Something that has really annoyed me during the debate about the forthcoming UK healthcare reforms is that when there is talk about the independent sector providing care for NHS funded patients, the independent sector is accused of cherry picking.  It is stated that the nice, clean and profitable work will be chosen leaving the NHS to pick up the more expensive, difficult and less popular work.

Well, I think it is time to be honest about this and in my opinion no healthcare organisation cherry picks like the NHS does.  When the NHS was established in the 1940s end of life hospice care was left out of the nationalisation as the NHS did not want to be involved in this expensive and unpopular work that ended in all of the patients dying.  The happy result of this is that without state interference the UK has a thriving, high quality hospice movement.

As time moves on and the NHS cannot afford to carry on as it has in the past, the cherry picking continues with NICE deciding what drugs the NHS will and will not give people, with infertility care rarely funded by the NHS, with much mental health and elderly care provided by the independent sector, with more and more surgical procedures being classed as cosmetic rather than plastic surgery so that the NHS can wiggle out of providing the, and even less dental procedures being available to NHS patients.

This is all very different to that founding promise of the NHS that all Medical, Dental and Nursing care would be free to everyone, rich or poor!

I find it both amazing and very sad just how many stories there are in the UK press at the moment about the disaster that is NHS cancer care.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported that patients are often being sent home with signs of cancer being missed or not followed up.  While today there is a new report out showing that, despite the billions of pounds that have been poured in to the NHS budget in recent years, the UK is amongst the worst countries in Europe for surviving cancer with around 10,000 lives per year being unnecessarily lost.

Just when are our politicians going to wake up and realise what the public already knows?  The NHS is a shambles, people are losing their lives and this system just cannot carry on.