We have to make NHS our top priority
As a retired hospital administrator, who spent a lifetime career in the National Health Service, it saddens me greatly to see its current unacceptable situation.
So where has it all gone wrong? I don’t think it has all gone wrong because it is important to remember the thousands of patients who have been very successfully treated.
We have simply lost our way on how to manage this fantastic service full of many wonderful and very clever hard working people.
So what kind of NHS do we really want? We’d like to see:
Waiting lists of staff desperate to join well paid and rewarding work.
Ambulances arriving in a reasonable time and certainly before the patient dies. Staff and visitors not having to pay to park.
Staff having adequate time to carry out their duties without becoming stressed. No employment of any agency staff except in an absolute emergency.
Royal National Lifeboat Service and the helicopter ambulance service not having to go begging to the public but being a part of the NHS.
Parents looking after children with learning difficulties and mental health problems being able to have permanent help and regular respite care near their home.
Total review of the NHS Dental Service so that appointments are available within a reasonable time, so that children do not have to wait up to two years or go private to have their teeth corrected.
GPS being once again responsible for their patients day and night and where routine face to face appointments are available within two to three days.
Where the care of the elderly is really incorporated in the NHS and the promise that no one will have to sell their home to pay for treatment and all treatment is free.
The recently announced new plans for social care are totally unacceptable and a promise broken. Thousands of elderly people will still have to sell their homes.
If we were able to fill the hundred thousand vacancies in the NHS, where is the money to pay them? Is all of this really possible?
Of course it is, but we will need to make dramatic changes to how we manage and finance our NHS, also how we manage other government departments.
So how do we pay for all of this? The irony is that we already have a great deal of this money but governments simply waste it.
We have to agree that the NHS is more important than even education and defence when it comes to finance. Everyone has the right of good health and without it everything else is so much more difficult and more expensive.
Having a healthy population saves huge sums of money.
So where is all this money? First of all the NHS is totally over administered. At present we have some 115 hospital trusts each costing up to £100,000 in annual salaries (plus huge running costs) for a part-time chairman and non-executive members.
This type of administration is totally unnecessary and unaffordable, and is depriving patient care of thousands of pounds.
It should be replaced by a multidisciplinary team led by the hospital administrator, with a senior nurse and senior consultant plus two local councillors to represent the local population all reporting to the local health authority or the new integrated care board.
(Under the current system the hospital administrator has the title of chief executive officer, this should be changed back to hospital administrator, as CEO gives the impression that he/she is above everyone else. and that goes against the grain. (Titles should tell the public what they do.)
Any legal procedures would be transferred to this group and name them accordingly. (Suggest “hospital management committee”, informs everyone what they do, and yes something from the past. Sometimes we have to go backwards to go forwards.)
No administrator should ever earn more than a senior doctor. When assessing future salaries they should be based on degree of responsibility and perhaps we will get the relationship correct.
The UK has the second largest legislature in the world after China. The House of Lords needs to be urgently reduced by half and membership by election saving thousands of pounds.
Recent reports include the Government wasting millions of pounds because they are so far behind with contracts, £800,000 spent on courses for the Lords and Commons branded as “waste of time and money,” £37,000 taxpayers’ money spent on a portrait of John Bercow, NHS wasted £1.1 million pounds throwing away more than 6,500 tonnes of food in one year, GPS being paid for millions of patients who have died, moved away or duplicates amounting to overpayment of nearly £846 million and Government departments are spending thousands of pounds on entertainment.
We can put a man on the Moon but we can’t recycle crutches/ wheelchairs. I have seen them thrown in skips outside one of my local hospitals.
The 5 year settlement to provide £34 million a year for the NHS by 2023/4 followed by a demand of £22 billion in efficiency savings – what is the point with the service already struggling with minimum
staff and Covid?
The Royal Family costs at least £45 million annually and we can’t afford cancer drugs. By all means have a Royal Family but someone has to tell them of the poverty and suffering in this country.
At the last count there were 18,000 patients in hospital beds for 21 days or more, occupying 1/5th of NHS beds which equates to 36 hospitals out of action. All because there is nowhere to discharge them to. We need to go back and provide local GP beds and /or provide full funding for patients to be treated in the community. It was a mistake to close all the small hospitals, although for some it was correct.
These are just a few examples of the atrocious waste and poor administration that continues every day. The patients and staff of our NHS deserve better.
What is really annoying is that we have the money to make all the improvements I have listed and lots more. All we need is a government brave enough to make these
changes and I am sure they would have the support of the whole country. What an opportunity and what a prize!
John Willet Trowbridge