Wednesday 9 May 2007

NHS Crisis. Answer: Make it worse

The BMA are calling for an independent board to run the NHS to protect it from "constant political dabbling".

Ok, so their answer to political dabbling in a State run and State-enforced funded de facto monopoly is to hand it over to an unelected QANGO.

What would Sir Lancelot say?


You...you...ignoramus!

EDIT: I have already posted on what I think should happen to the NHS - a move to Swiss-style, State regulated but independently run, pluralistic service.

5 comments:

CFD Ed said...

Here is an idea, probably a bit ahead of it’s time.

How about having senior consultants running hospitals!

They could have a secretary, or two, to do the admin and have senior nurses as sort of NCOs.

Then you could consider getting rid of much of the ancillary staff and have nurses at various levels of training take on much of the work.

Keep kitchen staff and have cleaning staff controlled by the Matron.

Roger Thornhill said...

Not sure if you saw my posting earlier on what I would do to sort out the NHS, i.e. migrate to the Swiss model. The issue is migration, as the mechanism clearly works in Switzerland, unlike the bonkers ideas now that have shown themselves NOT to work in Spain and NZ!

Would be interested in your thoughts on that.

I do think ancillary staff have a place, but Matrons are needed. Fact is, if you free up hospitals from the "dead hand" of the State, they will soon sort themselves out.

CFD Ed said...

The Swiss model looks like a good workable system.

The problem with suggesting almost any change may be needed is the reflexive, semi religious, ‘save the national health service’.

I suspect things will need to become more obviously unworkable before reasonable suggestions will be allowed to be considered. Things, sadly, are getting that way though.

Unknown said...

I don't understand - why we have problem in giving competition to NHS - I am not advocating to scrap the institution but lets give them competition like we have given to BT and BA in the past and cut the story short - I am sure, we will see how things will improve dramatically.

Roger Thornhill said...

If you follow the link in my second comment (I think I will edit the main story to have the link too) you will see how competition might be introduced.

The NHS is in no fit state to "compete" in the normal sense and you would not want to privatise a loss making entity as one organisation. Neither would you want to break it up and sell it off in the normal M&A way - that would result in either cherry-picking or fire-sale prices and probably both. Bad idea.