Nurses for Reform Blog

As the impact of the debt crisis starts to permeate consciousness and people come to understand the extent to which politicians have issued political cheuqes the state is not going to be able to cash, NFR welcomes this move by the GPs of the Haxby Practice in York.

While elite interest groups and ministers will no doubt carry on peddling their egalitarian and statist lies, at least out in the real world there are still honest medical entrepreneurs ready to innovate and chart a way forward.

As states and their welfare-banking systems faultier, our best option is to seek private medical services for the  underprivileged and low paid.  At this time of looming crisis, the more people who are encouraged to opt out of the NHS the better.

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.

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.

This irrelevant scaremongering nonsense is what we have come to expect from the Royal College of Nursing. It is designed to lead to the public to believe that 100,000 nursing jobs will be lost completely due to the Government spending cuts and healthcare reforms.

However, what is not taken in to account are the jobs for nurses that will be transferred to the private sector.  With reference to my previous post, I would suggest that we may see increased demand for nurses to work in many different healthcare settings.  As for the accusation that less nurses would be trained, surely the time has come for the state to lose its monopoly on nurse training and for us to see a plethora of new entrants to the nurse education market.

According to the UK press, this morning Prime Minister David Cameron will announce that many public services, including hospitals, will be run by independent companies, charities and mutual organisations.

For Nurses for Reform this is wonderful news, as regular readers of this blog will know, this is something that we have campaigned since our inception.

Mr Cameron has the future of the NHS in his hands and I urge him strongly not to drop the ball this time.  These reforms really are the only way to improve healthcare for NHS funded patients.

I have recently had to renew my daughter’s BUPA health insurance, while doing this I came across some very interesting information.

While discussing payment and cover options I was astounded to find out that if I wanted my daughter to have the option of using the private pay bed units in NHS hospitals I would have to pay considerably more than if she was to use only private hospitals.  This is because the NHS apparently makes no attempt to be competitive to attract business, they blindly charge far higher prices than the private sector and ultimately drive away business.

David Cameron and Andrew Lansley are right, the NHS should be opened up to competition and the sooner this happens the better.  I have no problem with the NHS using pay beds to generate income, what I do have a problem with is being ripped off!

Earlier this morning I was interviewed on LBC Radio with Peter Carter from the Royal College of Nursing I was pleased that I was able to convey many of the points that I wanted.

Briefly, I warned the RCN against going on strike.  To wander up a Scargillesque blind alley at this time of such national financial pressure would be fool hardy.  That said, if they do strike and I were in the government I would press ahead and seek to abolish National and Regional Collective Pay Bargaining.

Again, adamant that all UK hospitals should be placed in the independent sector so as to drive up quality NFR made the case that away from the whines of sectional trade unions real patient interests require some blue skies thinking

On Monday evening I was interviewed on LBC radio about the UKs healthcare reforms.

This morning I was interviewed on LBC Radio’s Sunday Morning Show to discuss the Government’s healthcare reforms and the response of the Royal College of Nursing