David Craig, on February 1st, 2021I’m going to continue my break from blogging till Monday 1 March.
But in the meantime here are some brief thoughts about the NHS
Mismanaging the NHS
I’m sure most frontline NHS workers have been doing an excellent job trying to save lives during Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague that was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the Autumn of 2019. But behind the scenes, it seems that utterly useless NHS management were busy mismanaging the NHS into collapse. Here are just four examples:
1. Fewer hospital beds
I don’t have the exact figures to hand, but if I remember correctly the NHS had almost 300,000 hospital beds around 30 years ago. When Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997 the NHS in England had over 200,000 hospital beds. By the time New Labour were replaced by the Tory/LibDem Coalition, the NHS (England) had just 141,000 beds.
When questioned in 2007 about the dramatic decrease in hospital bed numbers a Department of Health spokesperson explained, ‘bed numbers have fallen because people are being treated much more quickly – spending less time in hospital – and for many conditions medical advances mean they do not need to go to hospital at all’. Moreover the Health Secretary at the time, Patricia Hewitt, claimed that the reduction in the number of hospital beds was a sign of the success of her policies, ‘fewer beds are a sign of success – not of failure’. However, not everybody agreed and the Health Secretary was accused of ‘living on a fantasy planet, far removed from the reality of the frontline cuts that are having a daily adverse impact on NHS staff and patients’.
Not all other countries seem to have thought that having fewer hospital beds was good for a country’s health:
It was Patricia Hewitt who later became the minister for delivering the London Olympics which should have cost taxpayers around £2.4 billion and ended up costing us over £9 billion.
2. Fewer doctors
I don’t fully understand all the details. But I know that changes to the pension rules for NHS consultants and senior staff have had a detrimental impact on staffing levels, especially in A&E departments. These changes resulted in staff turning down additional shifts or even taking early retirement. Thus the NHS both lost some of its most experienced surgeons and those who were left had no incentive to take extra shifts due to draconian taxes they would have to pay.
3. Fewer nurses
Nurses used to be trained in teaching hospitals and I think the training was practical, on-the-job and took about two years. That training has now moved to universities, become much more academic and takes three years. I think that to become a nurse nowadays you actually have to have a degree. At first nurses received bursaries to help cover tuition and living costs. But I believe these have now been scrapped. So a nurse is now likely to start their career with £40,000 to £50,000 of student debt. The starting salary for a newly qualified (Level 5) nurse is about £24,900. As graduates only start repaying their student loans when their salaries hit £25,000, a nurse wouldn’t start repaying their loan immediately. In fact a nurse’s student debt would actually increase every year as the cumulative interest being charged would be greater than the annual repayments. After 30 years, nurses’ student debt would be cancelled with most probably owing over £70,000 by the time their debt is cancelled.
I ain’t no psychologist. But I would have thought that going through the first 30 years of your working life with a debt that starts at around £40,000 to £50,000 and then keeps increasing every year would be a fairly strong disincentive to many people thinking of entering nursing.
4. Ever more managers
The NHS has seen huge cuts in numbers of hospital beds, number of doctors and number of nurses. This has all happened during a time when the NHS’s budget increased in real terms every single year. So, where has all the money gone? There is happily one area where there have been huge increases in the NHS – the number of managers. At the start of New Labour’s terms in in government in 1997 there were 25,000 managers in the NHS (England). By the time of Gordon Brown’s election defeat in 2010, the number of NHS managers had shot up to about 43,000.
So the NHS (England) went from 8 beds per manager in 1997 to about 3.4 beds per manager by 2010. Since then the number of managers has dropped to around 38,000 – still massively above the 25,000 in the NHS (England) in 1997.
I did a ‘back of a fag packet’ calculation and reckon that each 10,000 extra managers cost the NHS over £1bn a year. Then you have to think of all the billions all these managers waste each year through their incompetence. For example, there was over £4bn squandered on a massive computer system that wasn’t necessary and could never work as I explained in one of my books thanks to a whistleblower giving me the truth about the great computer system’s failure.
Conclusion?
Given the above, it’s hardly surprising that we have all been locked in our homes for over a year to save what little is left of the NHS after years of almost unimaginable mismanagement.
I could say more about mismanagement in the NHS as I was married to a cancer surgeon for over 20 years and was briefly an elected governor of my local NHS trust till I resigned in protest against mismanagement there involving the magical disappearance of about £1.5 million that should have been used for patient care. But I’ll keep all that for another day.
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When did any socialist idea ever produce the intended results and they don’t come more socialist than the NHS? Socialist ideas always sound good, such as good health care for all, but the evidence shows that they never work. Bevan said the initial costs were high, but they would fall as people got healthier because of the NHS. Neither has happened. In addition, the NHS is highly unionised which always results in resistance to change.
Only socialists can argue that reducing beds is possible because they are becoming more efficient. It just means the limited money needs to go somewhere else, like salaries and pensions. They get away with it because it takes years to see the impact of their decisions and we have no influence over what our taxes are used for. With democracy, the masses will vote for everything they think is being provided for nothing and so there is continual increase in costs with no pressure to provide the services needed at a competitive price.
Every organisation funded by taxpayers just grows and grows and, in the process, has a greater influence over government decisions. We can see this the UN and in particular the IPCC which is now deciding energy policy because of a ridiculous belief that we can control the climate. Healthcare experts are now destroying the world economy because of their influence over governments. None of them will pay the price of their decisions because they are never held to account.
The debt for education applies in every area, and it seems that many people do not earn enough to pay it back, so the taxpayer ends up with the bill, just as we end up with the bill for benefits when people are not able to work because of poor health. There NHS ensures that there is no incentive for anybody to look after their health. It is my belief that businesses should pick up the bill for higher education by supporting students through university to meet their needs. This essential means the consumer of the services pays for education and training which seems correct to me. We must know the actual cost of everything we purchase to prioritise our decision making.
Check out Sir Simon Steven’s CV.He has or has had so many fingers in so many pies I wonder he has any time to manage anything effectively.All the usual suspects listed of course.The NHS is a socialist trojan horse that uses medical care as a front for it’s TRUE objectives.Dr Coleman makes interesting point that all medical staff injecting individuals with covid vaccines without informing them of the fact that the vaccine is experimental,might have side effects and they have the right to decline are in fact committing a criminal act.Why are Hope not Hate conducting a vicious campaign against such a well mannered man who is just making some well researched observations in an area in which he is well qualified.The only hate i s certainly not coming from Dr Coleman,so why the attack? The fact that the whole Covid debacle is a political coup on the Western democracies cannot be seen by so mandefies belief.They are soon going to experience the realities,by which time it might be too late
And now the NHS has just been given even more money to waste and surprise surprise our glorious NHS leaders are still complaining and they want more? Tax rises without any fundamental reform of the NHS is fundamentally flawed – and our gullible PM and Health Secretary who just love grandstanding have swollen this approach hook, line and sinker.
I’m interested in this because firstly, my wife is a Senior Staff Nurse who has been on the front line for over 30 years and I’m working in Government – so I know how they like to spend tax payers money. Recently though, and on a personal level my 21year old daughter has just had her second bought of open heart surgery in the Cardiac Unit in Bristol – she was operated on successfully in Southampton at 5 months old but recently needed a new repair.
Being interested in how large organisations operate I note the following care my daughter received:-
1) The surgeon was great – did a fantastic job and she is recovering well BUT
2) Care in CICU – post operation (6 and 1/2 hours) was ok – they decided to wake her up early because there was a bed crisis (July 2021).
3) I believe in CICU there is approx 1 nurse to 1 patient – over the weekend that became 0.5 nurses per patient.
4) Back on the ward nursing care post ward was non-existent – there were 6 Nursing Degree specialists who stood around and as far as I could tell did nothing to help my daughter – oh, 1 nurse offered to weigh her?
5) The day after she returned to the ward one of the nurses discovered her Oxygen supply hadn’t been switched on
6) She developed a pressure sore – for God’s sake she’s 21 – when my wife asked for cream – she was told to contact the Tissue specialist – a delay of 24 hours.
7) Now my daughter has had her sternum split twice in her lifetime – imagine the pain – again whilst in CICU – morphine helped – on the ward and in severe pain the Nursing Degree specialist said she had to contact the pain specialist again a wait of 24 hours – need less to say this is where my wife came into her own and demanded pain control.
8) Whilst in CICU – naturally they were scanning people for Covid – through a tick-box exercise – “Do you feel unwell?”, “Have you had covid symptoms” – we took lateral flow tests every day to see her – I photographed the results – they weren’t interested – I even had my inoculation card – not interested!.
9) Each launch time she was given a ham sandwich- she couldn’t eat and to the extent she was constipated – a doctor told my wife she needed an enema – she retorted “If you touch her I will bring assault charges against you” – he backed off!
So what do conclude form all of this – If my wife hadn’t been there – I’m not sure what the outcome would have been – I forgot to add that Only 1 person was allowed per visit.
The NHS is in a mess – too many managers – too many so called Nurse specialists who appear to not like getting their hands dirty. Its great having a nursing degree but if you can’t change a catheter – you are of no use in a hospital. In my daughters case, the only people that cared were the cleaners and meals staff. By the way this hospital is a centre of excellence. It has no empathy any more for people – just getting people home as quickly as possible.
To top all that off I’ve been waiting 2 years for an operation – so pre Covid days – so will the extra money be directed to the front-line – I don’t think it will – who will audit the funding?
David – we need an article (another) from you to explain the wastage in the NHS and a plan to stop this monumental wastage of tax payers money.
Also in my mind have hospitals spent their entire 220 Bn of treating Covid patients over the past 18 months – if they have my god what a waste – if not where’s the money?