Nursing NHS back to health

HARDLY a day goes by without yet another media warning about the state of our NHS and how it hovers on the brink of collapse.

It was well within my life that our NHS was the envy of the world and something to be copied by our friends across the Channel. So they did. Now in the league tables of efficiency and solvency we are way down the chart, stumbling along while NHS equivalents in Europe are praised to the skies.

Perhaps we should reverse the roles. We may have been the pioneers but something has gone wrong. Too many patients (especially OAPs as we just live longer and longer), saintly but overworked staff, doctors and nurses quitting in droves, wards crammed, vast bureaucracy (half superfluous) and permanent shortage of funds despite constant increases (yes, there really are). Because the NHS is the most sacred of sacred cows no politician dares propose what has to happen sooner or later: a complete reformation. And that after a long, hard study of the systems of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany.

It is practically forbidden to point out what happens to be true: that founder and Labour demigod Nye Bevan never envisaged what we have today.

He thought his new system would only be a safety net for the poor who could not afford private cover. He would be horrified at the thought of the well-to-do battening on the public purse when a modest premium will acquire a good family-size sickness/accident cover. But in Labour ranks that’s treason.

The trouble is, the Scandinavians use mixed-source funding and it seems to work. Maybe we should abandon idealism and go for pragmatism. But surely we cannot go on stumbling from crisis to crisis until final, humiliating implosion?