Nurses for Reform Blog

In his first major interview since becoming Health Secretary Andrew Lansley sets out his plans for the NHS.  To me this is just more tinkering around the edges.  He talks about nurses spending more time with patients and reducing health care acquired infections, while these are laudable intentions it sounds like he is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The NHS does not need more or new targets.  Targets are part of the problem of this broken system.  What we must hear from Andrew Lansley is how is going to change the system itself.  We have had more than 60 years of trying to make the NHS work and it still failing patients every day.

This is a great article in the Daily Telegraph discussing the history of mutuality in healthcare provision.  It is fascinating that all of the three main political parties are desperate to demonstrate their co-operative  credentials now that the public are way ahead of them. This article quotes a poll that shows only 11% of people want the government to deliver public services directly.

Yesterday I had an article published in the Daily Telegraph, discussing the future of the NHS and how NFR believes the process towards achieving better healthcare for the UK population should be started.

To read to complete article click here.

I also urge you to take time to read the comments.  It is amazing not only how people interpret what I have said differently but also how people have completely different expectations of what the NHS should be and do.

While it has long been apparent that vast swathes of the trade union movement promote private healthcare as a benefit of membership – remember this – and indeed many of the movement’s leaders have long avoided state healthcare, NFR passionately believes that trade unions are important in civil society.

As voluntary associations, trade union aligned friendly societies, mutuals and co-operatives have glorious histories and ones that we can learn from today. Born of the market and representing a wide range of diverse ownership philosophies one can actually make a good case that with its mutualist and charitable roots, Britain’s historic independent sector owes more of its history to workers, the labour movement and a worthy concern for the poor than to any political tribe of the so-called right.

This is a serious point. For NFR believes that to become more relevant and useful in the twenty first century, trade unions should consider using their large memberships and economies of scale to forge even better strategic alliances for the benefit of members. Indeed, politicians should stop penalizing trade union aligned, or for that matter, any other sort of independent healthcare. Instead, these good things should receive a much friendlier treatment in the taxation and legal spheres.

Since the recent meeting with David Cameron Nurses for Reform has attracted a vast amount of media attention. Perhaps most importantly we have also picked up lots of new support from registered nurses who have decided to formally sign up and support the organisation. Appalled by the horrific realities of state run healthcare many nurses have clearly been relieved to finally find an organisation that spells out some home truths about the NHS and campaigns to put the long term interests of patients first.

On the media front, NFR has been reported in The Daily Telegraph.  We have also been reported in The Mirror, here, here and here .  And we have been reported on major UK political blogs – such as Samizdata and the Adam Smith Institute .

There have been numerous other blogs about the organisation – including Liberal Conspiracy, Labourlist , and Tom Harris MP’s blog (to detail just a few) – and early this week I was interviewed by the Nursing Standard (readers will be able to see the result of this when the NS gets around to publishing it in a few weeks).

The really heartening thing about this episode is the dozens of nurses who have signed up to support NFR and what we stand for. Their emails and messages of support characteristically represent a profession who are tired of being gagged by politicians and misrepresented by the usual political class types at Unison and the Royal College of Nursing.

On the down side, NFR is mindful that many people in the UK and Europe still do not get how hostile the organisation is to American state healthcare. In failing to understand that the US government spends more on Medicare, Medicaid and S-Chip than the Pentagon spends on the military, it would be helpful if some of our detractors at least read this NFR article on why America does not have a free market healthcare system and therefore why NFR is hostile to the American healthcare system.