David Craig, on September 16th, 2024Monday-Tuesday blog
So we hear that some lord or other has written yet another report about our collapsing NHS. I haven’t read it and won’t waste my time on reading it. So I don’t know what’s in it. But I suspect:
- it doesn’t mention the pressure put on the NHS by our rulers allowing more than 5 million migrants coming to the UK from countries with limited to no health services and who will therefore use the NHS much more than the average British citizen. After all, that would not be politically correct
- it doesn’t mention the fact that the NHS squanders over £100,000,000 a year on worthless DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers when the NHS workforce is already much more diverse than the UK population. After all, that would not be politically correct
- it doesn’t mention the huge amount of NHS and social care resources being used to deal with the appalling and predictable consequences of consanguineous marriages. After all, that would not be politically correct
- it doesn’t mention the fact that probably up to a third of foreign-born nurses and probably many foreign-born doctors got their qualifications by cheating and corruption. For example, after a disastrous crash in utterly corrupt Pakistan, it was discovered that a third of PIA’s pilots weren’t qualified to fly a plane. And a couple of years ago, it was found that nurses coming from utterly corrupt Nigeria had been cheating on an industrial scale in getting their qualifications. But mentioning that would not be politically correct
- it will blame us for the NHS’s problems because we’re living too long and are too fat and unhealthy. So, to save the NHS the government needs to restrict what we can eat and how we live our lives. It will mention that because that is politically correct
More managers – fewer hospital beds
About 13 years ago, I wrote a book SQUANDERED about the massive scale of incompetence and waste under the Blair/Brown government. One of the charts I produced about the NHS showed that while the number of NHS managers went from about 25,000 to about 34,000, the number of hospital beds managed by those managers fell. So under Blair/Brown the NHS went from around 8 beds per manager to under 4 beds per manager:
I haven’t looked at the latest figures, but I suspect that the number of managers has continued to increase and the number of beds has continued to fall. So one might be tempted to wonder what all those managers do all day.
The strange case of the hospital car park
Whatever one may think about NHS managers, there seems to be one common behaviour – whenever there is a problem causing patient injuries or deaths, the managers do everything in their power to ignore what’s going wrong, to cover up problems and to persecute anyone daring to blow the whistle on such problems. We’ve seen that during the Mid-Staffs disaster, numerous maternity ward scandals, the Letby case and now the investigation of possibly 731 cases of medical malpractice at the ‘envy of the world’ Great Ormond Street children’s hospital.
I had my own run in with NHS hospital management a few years ago. I was elected as one of the governors at my local hospital. At the time the hospital had built a multi-storey car park for about £5,000,000. Having worked in almost 100 organisations in 15 countries you start to get an instinct about things which aren’t quite right. So I did a small investigation of how much other hospital car parks had cost to build comparing the cost per parking space. This suggested that the hospital where I was an elected governor should only have paid around £3,500,000 for its car park.
There were some other oddities about the contract:
- this car park should have been cheap to build as it was on flat ground, far away from the town centre with easy access from a dual carriageway
- the firm building it had built a shopping centre car park just about 2 miles away and this car park was a disaster which had to be completely rebuilt at enormous cost due to construction problems
- the firm building it had been found by the Competition and Markets authority to be the most corrupt in Britain due to its use of what’s called ‘cover pricing’. ‘Cover pricing’ occurs when several construction companies are invited to bid for a project. They get together and agree which company will get each project by all of them submitting hugely inflated bids with the chosen company submitting an inflated bid slightly below those of its supposed competitors
Once I had gathered evidence that the hospital had probably been overcharged by about £1,500,000 on the car park, I submitted this to hospital management. In reply I got a letter informing me that the role of an elected governor was to represent the hospital to the public and not to get involved in hospital management. I also contacted the NHS fraud department. I was visited by two supposed fraud inspectors. They showed no interest in looking at the material I had gathered and informed me that they did not feel that my claims merited further investigation.
But I doubt the good lord’s report will cover the issue of much of NHS management being unnecessary, useless, incompetent, arse-covering, over-paid, over-pensioned garbage.
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I remember a sit com called Only When I Laught. James Bolam and others set on a hospital ward, very good series however even then as part of the dialogue are references to the NHS being in crisis.This was mid 80s ish. The NHS will remain in crisis because the NHS wants to remain in crisis.
What you describe is the failure of socialism. People should start to ask themselves whether they would be prepared to pay for NHS services? They cannot answer the question because they have no idea how much any NHS service would cost them, and the NHS does not know either. Ludwig von Mises explained years ago why it was impossible for state controlled services to apply any economic calculations to what they do, as your car park example shows. Also, the managers pay no penalty for their failures, and are rewarded with a gold plated pension.
I take a simpler view. Why does anybody think that the government can make better decisions about their life than they can? Many have been fooled by the idea that government services do not cost them anything. Look at it another way, if we consider health care to be import and had to pay for it, what would we be prepared to give up? The same should apply to the state pensions if we had to provide it privately. The world would be a very different place if we took responsibility for ourselves, and more importantly the world we have chosen is not sustainable. As Lady Thatcher put it, socialists only stop spending when they run out of our money. That happened a long time ago and now it is all supported by a mountain of debt that cannot be repaid.
The proposed smoking ban is the result of socialism. It is nothing to do with smoking. It is a government attempt to reduce NHS costs. People should make their own decisions and pay the cost of smoking with paying for their extra health care. It is the same with immigration. We don’t have an immigration problem, we have a welfare problem. Socialism has to end before it brings civilisation to an end. What do the British politicians do – tell us we are leading the world over the cliff.
You missed “unaccountable” from your list of adjectives. I think this unaccountability is a large part of the problem. They can do exactly what they want without being held responsible in any way. Where is Amanda Pritchard is all this? Carrying on regardless! Knowing her over-inflated salary and gold plated pension are safe. What’s more alarming is that when you attempted to blow the whistle on the car park you were pretty much warned off. SOP for the NHS management.
And what can we do about it? Sweet Fanny Adams ????