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I haven't got a clue what they are proposing.

I heard a quote from David Cameron saying "We are not going to privatise the NHS" so now I'm pretty sure that they intend to privatise the NHS.

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I don't really know what they're proposing, but I'd hazzard a guess that as they've come from this government it'll mean that less well off people will be entitled to less help and have to pay more out of their ever decreasing finances, so I ticked I don't know/understand, but its a little of that and think they'll harm the NHS.

I don't trust any politician with the NHS.  All they want to do is tamper, fiddle or tinker with things that are usually working in spite of them.  Call Me Dave's reforms of the NHS will most likely result in monuments to doctors rather than patient care, with doctors' pet projects getting funding ahead of what may be required in the locality.

J Mark Oates
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The only people that are for the changes are the politicians. Everyone working within the NHS, including the GPs who will get more power via the proposals, have gone on record saying the changes will destroy the NHS in its current form.

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Quote:
The only people that are for the changes are the politicians. Everyone working within the NHS, including the GPs who will get more power via the proposals, have gone on record saying the changes will destroy the NHS in its current form.And that's the show-stopper, isn't it?  When you offer money and power to a group and they say "no thanks," you have to wonder.

The plans are a recipe for disaster.  Things have been bad enough in the NHS with it run by pencil-pushers (brought in by the Conservatives last time they were in).  Now they want to turn Doctors into administrators and accountants.  Exactly how are they supposed to be treating patients if they're running around going to endless funding meetings deciding how many locking forceps the local hospital needs?

If Call Me Dave would only be honest and say he and his party were committed to destroying the NHS and bringing in private health care and private health insurance, everybody would know where they were.

J Mark Oates
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The Home Of Lively Debate
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sprockethole.myreviewer.com

The goverment should not interfere with the NHS. Everytime there is a saving by reducing a job as cost cutting, and making more efficiencies in managment control, it leads to yet more disasters.

I can give a good example....

I was working in a rooftop plantroom reparing some equipment in a Hospital in London area, and looked down into a locked compound that the public cannot see.

In there was hundreds of broken aluminium zimmer frames. I asked the NHS property liasion manager alongside me, what is all that about ?

Well it seemed they sacked a handyman who repaired the broken zimmers and other such mundain but essential equipment, and if one screw comes loose now, they are put in the compound as scrap, unsafe due to health and safety.

Thousands of pounds worth of zimmers, wasted, and they have to order more. Now thats hospital inefficiency, and could easily be sorted by reinstating the handyman who repaired them. 

These are the things that should be looked at, not Goverment interference.

I worked in the NHS for 3 years and whilst I only have the hospital I worked at to go off I've heard similar stories from colleagues regarding others too so it wouldn't surprise if it's the same all over the country.

The vast majority of managers are unqualified morons (really, I can give so many examples) - on ridiculously high salaries for their work without really being accountable for their actions. There are a large number only in the senior positions they are in because there were no other applicants for the jobs - sad but true.

The amount of money wasted is ludicrous, thousands of pounds of drugs wasted every month because the ward staff keep opening new packs of tablets etc then they have to be thrown away instead of being used up.

HUGE amounts of money wasted on IT, web applications and so on because the people making the decisions don't have a clue about what they're deciding on and whether it's a good price or not (I was the most IT literate person in my department, was asked about a £1 million piece of software they were having developed for use nationwide, told them all the problems I saw with it, they ignored them and went ahead with it anyway...). The companies dealing with the NHS put their prices up (and for other public sectors too) because they know they'll get away with it.

Spending massive amounts of money to attempt to save money - all the mergers, restructures and other bullshit may look good on paper but they don't take into account that when they change name/logo etc they have to pay for branding, stationery, vehicle graphics etc. Another great example was a review on all admin & clerical staff (when too many managers was the problem, not the staff under them) so they paid £60,000 to have an outside company do a review on where money could be saved. This took over a year and a half and they'd have needed to get rid of more than 5 staff just to cover the costs of the review!

I could go on and on but my old manager said you can either work in the NHS or couldn't. The perks were great but seeing my tax money wasted like it was nothing really drove me up the wall and was one of the main reasons I left. I'd love to be optimistic and think it will improve one day but after working there it's very clear it never will.

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JohnnyTV says...
HUGE amounts of money wasted on IT...Spending massive amounts of money to attempt to save money ...vast majority of managers are unqualified morons ...It's such a shame that successive governments never actually fix this sort of thing, that all of us have heard countless examples of.

Instead of specifically trying to fix it, they decide that doing a load of other major things will fix it, as a by-product. It always just creates whole new unforeseen (by them, rarely by anyone else) issues that just make things worse.

And the idea that private companies can do things better is a myth imho, they can often do things cheaper because they'll pay lower wages, but if you look at all the IT projects in the NHS as an example, none of them were written or implimented by public sector workers, and they all pretty much suck.


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Yup totally agree Rob. A classic example was when I first started in my department, we needed an online database to track everything we were doing - there was one they'd paid Oracle to develop but it wouldn't be ready in time so I created my own, that took less than a week full time on my £12k salary.

We used mine (and updated it numerous times as the project altered) until the Oracle one was ready, over 6 months later and at a cost of over £40,000 that not only couldn't store everything we needed in terms of data but was also inconsistent with the project. They paid for more amends to be done to it (at god knows what cost, someone had said £1k per day) and it was still useless and we needed to use mine to run off essential reports etc as it was the only way to present the data.

However the finance department (who'd organised the Oracle database in the first place and were not any part of the project) said we HAD to use the Oracle one despite it being unfit for purpose, basically so it didn't look like they'd paid over £40k for something that wasn't being used. But because we couldn't get everything we needed from it, the whole team had to enter all amends to the database TWICE.

Yes that's right, they wasted over £40k plus over two and a half years of 4-5 staff time duplicating work which wouldn't have been needed if they wouldn't have gotten the Oracle database in the first place.

Yes another of the real life countless true examples of idiocy in the NHS. Honestly I dread to think how much money could be saved across the country if it was run properly.

But it's the same reason I don't vote, read the news etc, no matter what, nothing will change. Plenty of false promises and bs, better living with your ears and eyes closed to it all I reckon.