NHS doesn’t have to be so wasteful

THE Tories opposed “state medicine” in the NHS in 1948, and when Mrs Thatcher got the chance she privatised all the easy bits from which private enterprise must make a large profit from a captive market – cleaning, making food and running the car park, although intelligent people would have judged that cleaning infection should be a medical priority under ward control, and diets a function of medical responsibility.

But Tory voters, sharing Mrs T’s priority about shareholder profits, were and are happy to witness the dismemberment of the NHS.

It seems strange that such people are content to see their taxes wasted, in accordance with the aims of Mrs Thatcher. We have all been told that every year, the NHS spends billions of pounds on agency nurses and doctors, at swollen, inflated wage rates, with little close knowledge of the work, to privatelyowned agencies, at vast profit to them. The chosen system is the most inefficient, demotivating possible, at the highest prices, but it does achieve Mrs Thatcher’s criterion, a huge profit for agency shareholders.

All industries have the problem of forward planning staff levels, but the topmost, remote NHS management never became wiser, year from year, amongst changeable conditions of public health, so the planning has never improved, closer to the realistic level later shown to be essential, and the billions wasted on agencies never decreased.

And yet even the doziest of Mrs T’s admirers could see the most obvious answer: that the NHS should create its own regional agencies, with all the necessary knowledge of all the people concerned already in house, controlling the bloated wage rates and avoiding the private enterprise blackmail, where the NHS has no choice but pay. The finances could remain within the NHS to heal patients, preventing money bleeding away to shareholders who can contribute nothing. The Tory mind, because it is glued to money, wastes billions. Neville Westerman Brynna