Nurses for Reform Blog

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’.

This is a very insightful comment from my friend Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute;

“I wonder how many people going to the UK Uncut march today actually realise they’re fighting for the right to pay for the educations of people going to the Boat Race.”

Here is a great blog by Tom Clougherty of the Adam Smith Institute assessing the implications of the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill.

I was reminded of this quote again the other day. It is from Dr. Madsen Pirie and Dr. Eamonn Butlers’ report ‘The New Shape of Public Services’

“If a privatized health service had made many of its patients wait for 18 months for their operations, put them on trolleys in corridors when they arrived, given more than a quarter of them an illness which they did not have when they arrived, and confiscated the organs of their dead babies without bothering to seek their permission, or even to tell them, people would have blamed privatization. For that matter, if one of its practitioners had murdered 150 of his patients, or one of its surgeons had removed healthy kidneys instead of diseased ones, or one of its teams had conducted smear tests so incompetently that operable disease was not treated, while healthy women were unnecessarily subjected to distressing operations, all this would somehow have been put down to the reckless pursuit of profits, or to putting shareholders ahead of patients”.

I have an article published today on the Adam Smith Institute Blog.  Titled “The Micropolitics of Hospital Privatisation” it details the actions that NFR believes must be taken to improve UK healthcare provision. You can read the full text here.