Nhs

Should heads roll over the Mid Staffordshire Hospitals Trust scandal? I ask only because as I listened to Mark Carney giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee for several hours this morning, I found myself browsing through a number of articles on this site and others about the Libor scandal. Back in those heady days of George Osborne accusing Ed Balls of having questions to answer, and Bob Diamond resigning from Barclays ahead of his appearance before the same select committee, people were very keen for heads to roll, and not just those sitting on bankers’ necks. They were also keen that those who performed badly when questioned about their

Jeremy Hunt has announced new plans to shift the NHS into the twenty first century by removing all vestiges of paper by 2018. While computerising health records sounds mundane and complicated, the Health Secretary has done his best to make the plans appear logical and advantageous. In his announcement, Hunt says: ‘The NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution. It is crazy that ambulance drivers cannot access a full medical history of someone they are picking up in an emergency – and that GPs and hospitals still struggle to share digital records.’ The interim stages to Hunt’s ultimate goal sound realistic. Records held

While Ed Miliband wasn’t exactly Mr Pugnacious today at PMQs, one of his better blows was when he read out the promise in the Coalition Agreement to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS’ and asked whether that would be on a list of broken promises in the audit of government achievements. Labour always sees the NHS as an easy way to score points now that the government’s hard-won credibility has been scuppered by the Health and Social Care Act, and naturally Miliband roused some cheers from his MPs. James argued back in December that it is now impossible to have a mature conversation about the NHS. Indeed, the Tories

Nigel Lawson described the NHS as the closest thing to a national religion that this country has. The NHS is certainly like a national religion to the extent that it is pretty much impossible to have a rational debate about it. There is often a choice posited between the NHS and no healthcare at all. One can see this mindset in today’s Guardian article on the news that the Thatcher government in 1982 held Cabinet discussions about fundamental rethinking the size and shape of the state. Here is the section on the health service: ‘But the earlier version’s most controversial privatisation proposal concerned the health service: “It is therefore worth

Tory MP and GP Phillip Lee made a striking call this morning for patients suffering from lifestyle-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes to pay for their prescriptions as part of a larger shake-up of the NHS. He was speaking as part of a series of presentations from members of the Free Enterprise Group ahead of next week’s Autumn Statement on their proposals for spending cuts which would allow George Osborne to meet his target of having debt as a proportion of GDP falling by 2015/16. Lee said that to ensure that people could continue to access care when they needed it, the NHS needed a fundamental reform. He told

Earlier this week my wife called to make a GP appointment for our daughter, who has been experiencing some worrying tummy pains.  Middle of next week she was told, earliest. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t call at 8 o’clock,’ the receptionist chided. ‘We had several slots then, but now they’ve all gone.’ Silly us for prioritising getting the children to school at that time of the morning. I expect that Jeremy Hunt would say that it is precisely this kind of thing – not a scandal, not a crisis, but just one of a million similar tiny rebuffs people experience at the hands of the NHS every week – that

Her Majesty’s Comptroller and Auditor General seems to have been nicking ideas from Private Eye. National Audit Office reports these days arrive with a frontispiece of ‘key facts’, reminiscent of the Eye’s ‘number crunching’ feature, plucking a handful of noteworthy numerals from the deluge of auditry that follows, and designed presumably to make the reader go ‘gosh’. In the NAO’s latest report, on the awarding two years ago of a franchise to run a hospital in Cambridgeshire, one ‘key fact’ leaps out. ‘£0’, it says, ‘is the amount Circle will earn over the ten-year life of the franchise, unless the Trust achieves a surplus under its management’. Yes, that’s right.

The recent media storm over the Liverpool Care Pathway has obscured the progress doctors and nurses have made over the past decades in the UK in improving care for patients who are near death. Since the LCP was developed, patients in busy hospitals and other institutions are  less likely to be left to die in pain and discomfort. The Pathway itself is simply a framework which reminds professionals to consider, and document, the process of care for people in the last days of life. Without it, some professionals may struggle to shift their focus to important aspects of care such as comfort measures, pain control, communicating with, and supporting, the

One of the problems with the welfare state is that the contributory principle too often gets lost. People’s faith in the whole system is undermined when they see those who haven’t put it, or even tried to, taking out. A classic example of this is ‘health tourists’, those who come here from abroad with the deliberate aim of taking advantage of the medical care offered by the NHS. Too little is being done to address this problem. The Daily Mail reports today that ‘New guidelines tell doctors across England they must register any foreign patient who asks for care otherwise it would be ‘discriminatory’.’ The problem with this is that

In this week’s Spectator James Forsyth interviews new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt about how he will continue Andrew Lansley’s legacy on NHS reform. He says his ‘burning mission’ is to ‘demonstrate that we have as much to offer the NHS as Labour ever did’. But while Hunt is keen to praise the work of his predecessor, he takes a strikingly different line on the health budget. James writes: Another striking difference between them is their views on the future of the NHS budget. When The Spectator interviewed Andrew Lansley at Christmas, he was clear that he believed that the health budget would have to carry on rising in real terms

Hell hath no fury like a government minister sacked (as proven by our anonymous ‘Dumped by Dave’ piece this week). Another former minister, Paul Burstow, lost his job because Nick Clegg was miffed at the way the Lib Dem had failed to flag up the dangers in the Health and Social Care Bill. He’d already formed a habit of briefing against his own department when he was in office, so it’s no great shock that Burstow has decided to dish the dirt on the Treasury in the Telegraph today, claiming it is responsible for blocking reform of the social care system. He writes: ‘Of course, if fixing this was easy

George Osborne has long regarded support for the NHS as the most important aspect of Tory modernisation. For this reason, I think it is highly unlikely that the ring-fence will be removed from around the NHS budget. But I suspect that the practical, as opposed to symbolic, importance of the ring-fence will be diluted by more and more things being classified as health spending. At a Quad meeting on the Dilnot proposals on social care, George Osborne told Andrew Lansley that the £1.7bn cost of them, which rises to £5bn within 3 years, should be met out of the NHS budget. Lansley resisted this idea. But I understand from senior

Anna Soubry has given a wonderfully colourful interview to The Times today about her new job as Health Minister. The Conservative MP jumps through the usual hoops of having to talk about how she loves wearing high heels but doesn’t enjoy baking cupcakes, but she also makes a number of striking comments about health policy. The most-widely-picked-up have been her comments on euthanasia. She told the newspaper: ‘The rules that we have about who we don’t prosecute allow things to happen but there’s a good argument that we should be a bit more honest about it.’ Norman Lamb appeared on Sky News this morning to say he also felt there