This may be a tad unfair. Mr B has been one of the few consistent voices of compassionate sanity in all this. Aside from his occasional public dissent, I'd guess he privately winces at much of what his colleagues do and say but feels he must reserve his ire for the worst excesses
More to the point, the article being referenced by Prof Tim Evans is a masterpiece of constructive criticism.
It is refreshingly NOT a piece of #NHS hagiography, nor does it degenerate into a blanket condemnation of past errors.
It is refreshingly NOT a piece of #NHS hagiography, nor does it degenerate into a blanket condemnation of past errors.
Too many of the #NHS' failings are institutional. Where this virus shows up both its inherent weaknesses and -more importantly- its crisis-driven capacity to change for the better, Prof Evans urges us rightly not to ignore the lessons of either.
One of the pernicious elements of this 'Our #NHS' propaganda - the still-Orwellian inversion of the Two-Minute-Hate - is that it will make that sacred cow all the more unimpugnably holy. Harder to ration in its resource use; even more immune to reasoned complaint
Doctors & nurses are generally & laudably diligent professionals, not superhumans or angels of mercy. We must be grateful for their training and dedication, but not make idols of them. They would greatly help their own cause by being less reflexively defensive of their employer
It is not just 'evil Tory governments' who leave them unable to treat all known ills in an 8-hour working day, with no restraints upon resources.
Resources -for any cause, however worthy- are unavoidably scarce and their allocation, especially in such a sensitive field-
Resources -for any cause, however worthy- are unavoidably scarce and their allocation, especially in such a sensitive field-
-unfailingly contentious.
Even if we were to devote ALL of our labour, skills, and energies to health, it would not suffice to banish all pain - much less end mortality - but it WOULD impoverish our lives in their totality by sacrificing the richness of experience of other life.
Even if we were to devote ALL of our labour, skills, and energies to health, it would not suffice to banish all pain - much less end mortality - but it WOULD impoverish our lives in their totality by sacrificing the richness of experience of other life.
What we should therefore ask is: could the #NHS be better organised -WITHIN THE SAME BUDGET as a starting point- to meet society's demands for medical care? Could it be made more efficient, more responsive, more innovative, more dynamic?
It is hard to say that is NOT the case.
It is hard to say that is NOT the case.
Large, unwieldy organistaions in the private sector are prone to sclerosis and box-ticking managerialism, much less vast socialistic (let's be honest here) bureaucracies with whom the temptation is to measure performance against arbitrary Stalinistic targets, not patient outcomes
In the private sector (remember that, children?), true customer satisfaction is the key to -and is measured by- the delivery of profits (the principal virtue of a much-derided metric). If primitive fears of allowing this to deliver improved health on the part of the same people-
-who'd be horrified at being told to shop for food only at a government-run grocery store, or to queue for their clothing allotment at a state-run outfitters is still too big a stretch, perhaps that is a failure of education and a lack of informed opinion.
The false, mendacious dichotomy always presented is that between the Socialistic Utopia of the UK's #NHS (surely a unique example of such a functional success, were it true) and the despicable Devil-Take-The-Hindmost horrors of the caricature of the US system we are usually given
Yet other systems exist all around the world - many, surprisingly enough, in advanced Western societies - some of them more overtly 'socialist' than the UK - and, while far from perfect, some of these produce better results at lower cost than does the British system.
Instead of worshipping the Archbishop of Casualty and treating each seedy, often dangerously nosocomial hospital block as a secular temple to a 1940s vision of the City on a Hill, can we not stop and think how better to order our affairs and spend our scarce resources in future?
We, the current and future patients deserve this. The medical staff deserve it. Even their whipping-boy, but at least partially indispensable, administrators deserve it.
Can we for once #NotWasteAGoodCrisis to do some good, not merely to advance an unpopular change by stealth?
Can we for once #NotWasteAGoodCrisis to do some good, not merely to advance an unpopular change by stealth?
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