Business targets are no way to run healthcare
IN an ideal world, which clearly this is not, healthcare should not be a business. This is somewhat problematic because healthcare already is a business, companies create the drugs and machines and everything else that’s applied in a healthcare environment.
However, it’s not chargeable to the end users, and that’s the point of the NHS.
Systems of healing should not, ideally, be only available to those who have the money to pay for them.
It’s one of the great hypocrisies of our age that we bleat about how we can’t put a price on life, then do exactly that, all the time.
We are fortunate in this country that we don’t typically have to take out loans to pay for medical care for ourselves or loved ones.
Although after a decade and a half of Conservative Government mismanagement we are now unfortunately heading in that direction.
The patient doesn’t have to pay for the operation, but it may be that they have to wait several years for it, or even in the case of urgent cancer surgery, four or five months. In which case it’s not so much a waiting list, and more akin to death row.
This is the stark reality of the NHS now, the targets are unhittable, and ‘business managers’ are the ones deciding who gets surgery in the coming weeks, not the actual consultants and surgeons who know their patients and know their needs.
How did we get to the point where life or death medical decisions are not made by medical people based on medical need, and are instead made by bureaucrats with political agendas being passed down to them from, ultimately, politicians?
Did you think the most urgent cases are treated first, operated on soonest? Guess again.
The Government took the decision-making out of the hands of the brilliant consultants who trained for a decade to master their healing arts and who know the actual patients and gave it to layers of pointless management people who tick boxes and move numbers to hit, or try to hit, or make it look as if they hit, targets, in order to make their political paymasters appear to be doing a good job.
The NHS could certainly save a lot of money and be more effective as a system of healing if it were to get rid of the multiple strata of non-medical management.
The NHS could, I’m sure, benefit from a huge cull of micro managers, target fixators, and other non-medical personnel, and the money saved could be invested in nurses, doctors, equipment, hospitals, and specialists, which would actually have the impact of reducing waiting times and simultaneously making the system fit for purpose and empowering the people who care about healing people to do their jobs.
But hey, that’s what happens when you trust the Conservative Party with something so important it literally means life or death, wellness or suffering, for millions of people.
You only have to look at the PPE scandals of Covid to know the priorities of these politicians.
If you care about the health of your loved ones and yourself do not give them another term in power.
I don’t think the NHS would survive it. Certainly thousands of people with cancer would not.