Nurses for Reform Blog

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.

Putting to one side the dire financial situation this country is in, I do still find it amazing that despite continued evidence that the NHS is failing the British people the trade unions continue to bury their heads in the sand.  While the rest of us, our family and friends are finding out on a daily basis that the NHS cannot and will not live up to the promises of the 1940s the unions are now threatening to make matters worse by going on strike.

What also interests me is that  for all their complaining and protesting I cannot find any evidence that Unison can suggest alternative ways of reforming the NHS.  They go on and on about fairness and equality but there is not one jot of a suggestion of how they would do things.   Maybe Dave Prentis knows the way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that will solve all our problems, but in the real world the truth is that it will continue to be the elderly and the most vulnerable in society that suffer from the strike action proposed by Mr Prentis and his members.

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.

Now that we are all back at work I would like to wish all of my readers a very Happy New Year!

Unsurprisingly, 2011 begins with yet more stories of how the NHS is failing its customers.  Yet again the elderly and those with chronic illnesses are bearing the brunt of the failure as the stories here and here demonstrate.

2011 marks the centenary of Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act (more of which over the coming months). Surely, 100 years on with stories like these becoming an almost daily occurrence, it time for the government to admit that state interference in health and social care is not working!

This is a truly appalling story, the NHS continues to starve many thousands of patients in it’s care every year.  However, what makes this worse is that it is not a new story. I have written before on the appalling state of patient nutrition in NHS hospitals.

This is what happens when nurses become managers, filling forms to enable the Secretary of State for Health look good at the dispatch box,  while patient care is left to untrained staff.

When I had an operation in the private sector a couple of years ago I met many nurses working there who had taken a pay cut by leaving the NHS and had done so because the private hospitals gave them the opportunity to concentrate on caring for patients, i.e. nursing, rather than paperwork.

Surely we are getting to the stage when the government has to realise that the NHS has had enough chances of survival in its current state. This report that has been launched over the weekend demonstrates that NHS Trusts are persistently failing their patients with fatal results.

It is time for the coalition government to act.  NHS provided care does not work.  All NHS hospitals must be returned to the independent sector.   The NHS can then be a funding organisation that contracts with these hospitals and if treatment and care is not provided to acceptable standards then contracts must be removed and failing hospitals allowed to be closed or taken over by more successful trusts.

This is the only way forward for state funded healthcare in the UK and the sooner that the government acts to stop the rot in this failing system the better.

This is a shocking but unfortunately not surprising report about the way in which the UKs elderly population are being failed by the NHS.

Our elderly generation is the one that was promised all healthcare from Cradle to Grave, and it is certainly having its journey to the latter hastened in appalling circumstances.

What is truly awful though is the lack of upset that this story has caused. No government ministers have been calling for enquiries or promising to get to the bottom of this. Andrew Lansley, the Secretary of State for Health, has made no comment that I can find, this story has been allowed to die and the UKs elderly population will continue to pay the price of a National Health Service that is not fit for purpose and that requires urgent and radical reform.

In 1948 the British government put a leaflet through the door of every household. It said, in black and white, that: “the NHS will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone – rich or poor – can use it.”

However, more than 60 years later this lady, who had worked for and believed in the NHS, was denied basic diagnostic care because it was the weekend!

As time goes on we are seeing more and more examples of how the NHS promise is not worth the paper that it is written on. This, and many other examples that I have previously written about, should warn the American people that more government intervention in healthcare is not a path that they should take,

I was at a party yesterday and got in to conversation with someone about the NHS and healthcare provision and funding in the UK.  What was most interesting was that, although they admitted that the NHS was a system that failed people, they still thought that the Government would be able to put things right.  The idea that given government has made such a mess of things should mean that it should stay out of healthcare in the future was not something that had been considered.

With stories such as this and this appearing daily in our press isn’t it time to give the market a chance to put things right?

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.