NHS’s great new idea to get rid of expensive old people

You’ve probably all heard the official politically-correct narrative:

1. The NHS is in crisis.

2. The NHS needs more money.

3. The reason the NHS is in crisis and needs more money is that there are too many old people requiring expensive treatments.

There are a few things this oft-repeated narrative doesn’t mention:

1. In the last 15 years the NHS budget has shot up from £45bn a year to around £110bn a year.

2. Since New Labour decided to open the borders to rub our noses in multiculturalism, about 7 million people flooded into Britain with around 46,000 still pouring in every month and they all expect free health care from the NHS.

3. Immigrants have much higher birth rates than Brits and, because of first-cousin marriages, the rate of birth defects has rocketed.

4. Most of the old people, who are supposedly bankrupting the NHS, have worked and paid taxes all their lives (unlike our 7 million immigrants) and believed that when they fell ill, they would be looked after and not pilloried for still being alive.

The NHS has tried various ways of dealing with these expensive old people. At the time I published WHO CARES? by Amanda Steane, I found an NHS report that estimated that (when New Labour were supposedly ‘saving the NHS’) around 34,000 people die unnecessarily in NHS hospitals each year and another 29,000 were severely disabled due to poor care. Just in one hospital, Mid-Stafford NHS Trust, about 1,200 patients died due to poor care. That report has since ‘disappeared’.

Then there was the inappropriately-named Liverpool Care Pathway. (Perhaps it should have been called the Liverpool Pathway to Heaven?) This wonderful end-of-life plan was scrapped after a review found that hospital staff ‘wrongly’ interpreted its guidance for care of the dying, leading to patients being drugged and deprived of fluids in their last weeks of life. So, hospital decides patient will soon die, hospital deprives patient of fluids, patient suffers kidney failure and dies, hospital is proved right that patient was about to die. Brilliant! The ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now the NHS has come up with a new way of disposing of the elderly. It’s called “Cristal” (Critera for Screening and Triaging to Appropriate aLternative care). It’s a checklist that NHS hospitals can use. It has 29 questions and if you unfortunately tick all the right boxes, then you might as well start booking your funeral as you’ll be deprived of life-prolonging medical care and sent home to die. And, of course, your death will prove how accurate Cristal was in predicting that you would soon die!

The NHS assures us that the aim of Cristal is “to kick-start frank discussions about end of life care, and minimise the risk of invasive ineffective treatment”.

And, of course we need some procedure to decide when it is no longer appropriate to prolong life. But there are two certainties with Cristal:

1. It will be abused by bonus-hungry hospital managers keen to get rid of expensive old people in order to protect their budgets.

2. The rich, the famous, politicians and NHS bureaucrats themselves will never be subjected to Cristal – it’s just for us worthless plebs.

So, enjoy your life while you can, because one day Cristal may come and get you.

(Oh, and if you haven’t read my book WHO CARES? which I ghost-wrote with Midlands housewife Amanda Steane, it might be worth giving it a go. It reveals what really happens when NHS managers put their own precious careers before patient care. You can even get a used copy for just £0.01p plus postage)