And yet the real culprits are us……..
If you do a little surfing on a Sunday evening, you will come across a lot of web site that are proclaiming “keep our NHS public”. They have good access to politicians, tend to be backed by one of the public sector unions, and have crippled the debate on healthcare, and kept from the public view the real data on the health services performance. They rarely mention that our cancer care and heart care rates are basically third world in terms of survivability and the responsiveness of the service to trying and cure issues associated with those two broad disease groups.
If you don’t think we are very behind the times. Take, what is today, a very routine and uncomplicated diagnostic test that if done correctly and quickly can save your life if you are a woman, the cervical smear. Want to guess how long you have to wait for the result to this test in the UK? Remember, you have gone in to see if you have a type of cancer, well the AVERAGE time is 5 weeks. Want to guess what the time in France, Germany and most of the other western European countries? 5 days. Why is this? It’s because the NHS has failed to reform itself. Take Lord Patrick Carter, even with the fancy name the guy was an owner of nursing homes, gave a lot to the Labour Party, well, you know the rest. He was asked to do a review of the pathology service within the NHS. Why he was asked is hard to tell given his background. Until recently he ran Sport England! Anyway, his report out this year said that there should be some changes, didn’t say how, and never pointed to the person who would carry it out. We had a review though. Let Lord Carter do a job for a few months and feel important, but other than that, women who are worried they might have cancer continue to wait 5 weeks. Do the pathologists care? Hell no. Politicians? No. Doctors? No. Only the poor woman who is forced to wait 5 weeks for something her French counterpart can have in 5 days.
You might be thinking at this point that of all the procedures carried out by the NHS this is a small if insignificant complaint. Actually my point is that this is one of the easy ones to fix. The harder ones are the big stuff like MRI scans and the other big ticket diagnostics. Have you ever pulled up to your local NHS hospital and after paying exorbitant amount to park, looked up to see a large trailer parked next to the Hospital with mobile MRI written on it? Well those tend to be privately owned MRI’s that are supplementing the NHS MRI, if they have one. If you ask the trust why they need and extra MRI, as I did recently, you get the answer that they don’t have enough money, or staff, or that their training is not up to scratch. After a time I stopped listening, the list was longer that I could remember. I happened to see one of the technicians from the MRI in a box, and ask her why they were there. She stated that they or someone else did this for the majority of hospitals in England and some in Scotland because the NHS were, in her words, “too lazy to run their MRI efficiently”. I ask what she meant by that. On her summary, it would appear the NHS MRI at the hospital in question would have a leisurely opening at 10 and close by 12 for a 2 hour lunch and once again see patients to 4 so the work force (and I guess that might be a little tongue in cheek) could get home by 5.
On the other hand the private MRI opened at 7 and continued to see patients until 7 in the evening, sometimes later if required by a doctor. The technician went on to say that this was not uncommon across the NHS. There was little incentive to increase productivity. It was interesting to hear that although the government had set reasonably tight targets around waiting times that since there was nothing that required the NHS to pull it’s collective socks up from an efficiency perspective, they were increasingly turning to the private sector to bail them out of trouble and help hit the government targets. Company’s like hers had seen a three fold increase in business over the last few years, and she insisted it wasn’t privatisation but purely NHS spend to help them out of a hole.
Having a loved one in the hospital recently which was the catalyst for this blog incidentally, brought home to me how ineffective NHS staff really are. When you challenge a nurse and ask why your family member has not receiving even the basic care they deserve, the majority of the time I would get one if not all of three excuses.
1. There is not enough money
2. The Government targets get in the way of me doing my job
3. The management of the hospital are too worried about costs
I listened to all of these for the first week my Grandmother was in hospital. Then I began to challenge these statements. I wanted to know why, at a time of massive investment, there wasn’t enough money. The usual response was that the government is lying about the real figure. I don’t think so. I would also ask how that was responsible for nurses not doing their job? It usually came back to money and the management at that point, or the targets made them do things they didn’t want to. If that was the case, didn’t they have a duty to tell the government to get stuffed and take are of their patient? Well that was all too difficult really. I started to ALWAYS ask this questions; why are you so vocal when it comes to blackmailing the government for more money for yourselves? Never have received an answer to that even though it is true. Go to Unisons website. They NEVER talk about the patients welfare unless it is in the context of trying to keep the private sector out of the NHS or more pay for their nurses.
My point is that the doctors and nurses have it all their own way now. Look at the hapless David Cameron and the simpleton who is shadow health secretary, Lansley. They have both become NHS apologists. They would also have you believe that it is the poor doctors and nurses who have been hard done by not the patient. They seem not to realise that there are 60 million patients, and only 1.3 million NHS employees.
If the NHS is to change, and it needs to so that we and our loved ones stop dying needlessly, we will all have to get involved and help turn the tide onto the side of the patient.
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