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May be a contentious subject but none the less a vital one to discuss . Do we think that the degrading of the Health Service is due to Tory ineptitude or a deliberate attempt to prepare it for Privatisation, or a bit of both?
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Do we think that the degrading of the Health Service is due to Tory ineptitude or a deliberate attempt to prepare it for Privatisation, or a bit of both?
So one question is what will/would Labour do with the NHS. Starmer as already said he wants to privatise part of the NHS.
When the Blair government came to power, ministers were told the NHS was underfunded, so they doubled the budget and cut waiting times from the previous government- Remember Blair’s second term in office……
“Tony Blair took office in 1997, with the promise of removing “internal markets” in the NHS – the idea that Health Authorities ceased to run their hospitals, but “purchased” care from their own or other authorities hospitals.
However, during his second term, Mr Blair actually pursued measures to strengthen the internal market as part of his plan to “modernise” the NHS.
Driving these reforms were a number of factors including the rising costs of medical technology and medicines, the desire to increase standards and “patient choice”, an ageing population, and a desire to contain government expenditure.
The Blair government, while leaving services free at the point of use, encouraged the outsourcing of medical services and under the Private Finance Initiative, an increasing number of hospitals were built, or rebuilt, by private companies too.
However, the Labour government soon fell-out with GMB union reps after a “framework document” appeared to propose watering down the foundations of the NHS, too.
The plan referred to the NHS being “overwhelmingly free” as opposed to comprehensively free at the point of delivery.
It also made reference to the creation of “mutuals or public interest companies within the NHS”, similar to charities, that would run hospitals and stated, “we need to use suppliers of private health care to the full”.
From 2003, successive waves of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) were opened throughout England, run by private companies for profit – known as the NHS Partner Network.”
On that aspect, its worth remembering both parties in one way or the other support privatisation. What ever happen’s us pheasants are highly unlikely to have a say in the future of the NHS or how it is run.
My own oppinion say’s – if we (any part) can do what Blair was hoping to achieve before he got stopped and privatise to a certain point, the NHS may well be in a far better place than it is today.
I’m not going to say much more on the subject, but for the record
I would prefer part x% privatisation, rather than the NHS collapsing and we end up with a USA style system.
Kezo I’m not a Labour supporter despite what people think. I was no great lover of Blair and we are still paying through the teeth for his “private finance initiative” programme. But he did make sure the NHS was better funded.
I’m in work and just spoke to one of the Paramedics who started this morning 6.00 am and has not been able to do any red calls as he’s been stuck outside the local hospital unable to unload his patient.
Thats because of austerity, not only the NHS has been underfunded the local authorities have also had their funding drastically reduced. They have been forced to sell many of their care homes and drastically degraded other elements of Social care. The knock on effect of austerity is the collapse of Social Care which in turn impacts the NHS negatively.
Many Tories want to privatise the NHS which is why as mentioned they voted down legislation protecting it from privatisation. The NHS is not safe with the tories.
sorry but your wrong, ive worked in several nhs accounts departments and there is a huge amount of duplication and waste of money. the management refusing to allow flexible and part time working means that the bank (temp staff) has gone through the roof. i did a study for a pct that showed it could save over a million quid per year but it was shelved.
as regards the ambulances at a+e, that because councils have subcontracted or totally ddevolved home care, thats a council decision not central govt and most of the councils around here are labour. many years ago there were recovery hospitals where patients needing little interventional care were discharged to recover enough to go home theyve all gone.
so to continually blame just the tories is false, theyre all as bad as each other jst in different ways.
Kezo I’m not a Labour supporter despite what people think
I’m not saying you are, rather pointing out the facts both parties are want some form of privatisation, along with the fact Starmer has also said he would privatise some parts of the NHS.
As @mitch has said they are both as bad as each other. The rest of his comment makes sense to
I work for the NHS and have done so for the last 10 years. In that time I’ve seen the service degraded by the government of the day. Austerity imposed by the Tory government cut funding for the NHS and Social care and we are now paying the price.
The reason Councils have outsourced services is because the central government grant they rely on has been cut to the bone. That has resulted in the logjams we have where patients are having to stay at hospital because there are inadequate social care places.
The reason Public sector services are in turmoil is as a direct result of the Austerity policies of this government. Austerity pushes people into poverty and weakens public services. If you can’t see the cause and effect I’d suggest you’re not really looking.
there needs to be a radical rethink with the nhs because theres a huge amount of money wasted by trusts and councils and a complete lack of joined up thinking.
in one of our hospitals they closed an a&e recovery ward because it was proposed that people would be discharged quickly with a home care package.
problem was no one thought to see if the facilities existed to get a home care package in place that quickly.
no one spoke to either the council or private contractors.
the local council did away with its home care ddepartment and then reduced the amount it would pay to outside firms to provide the same care. just as the numbers of people needing care increased.
so they expect someone else to provide more than they did but for less money.
Trying not to tell granny(ies) about egg sucking but:
Since the last Labour Government the Tories felt forced to cut spending whilst ‘masking’ how badly by constantly telling us they’ve spent more than ever before. However, I believe if you are to cut spending and maintain service standards you don’t just hack off a chunk of budget and expect management (with a vested interest) to reduce spending.
I have contracted with both the MoD and NHS and can say one thing with ease, they are both experts at saving money without spending a penny less. It’s an insane method of allocation of money to personnel even when vacant and using budgets as the metric for the savings. So if you had a budget of £1m then the next year it was £850k you’ve saved your trust £150k or 15%. However, your spend may well have been £790k in reality with accountants accruing spend into the year that really could have belonged in future budgets. Anyhoo
The way forward isn’t to cut or increase budgeting as in previous years, there needs to be a complete reform of practices required to run, administer and manage front line services. Some tweaking around delivery of services and where that delivery can be best done but there’s a lot that can be done just in sorting out the BS. For example, one NHS trust had 5 Management Accountants, each one having an assistant and each assistant having transactional administrators, sometimes 2 sometimes 3. By combining the transactional services, they saved 5 people at the lowest level, however, they hired a ‘Hub Administration Manager’ and Deputy, total saving 2 Band 2 (I think) roles or about 24k per year. If they did the same with the MAs and Assistants who were much better paid, whilst standardising the systems and reporting they used, they could have saved 2 MAs (Band 6 or higher) and 3, maybe 4 Assistants. No need for management so that’s around 250k in salary. No drop in service level but those proposing savings were (can you guess?) the Management Accountants for each of the budgets they managed.
Likewise, in the MoD the project I was involved with came in on budget (£250M on budget, on time, under spec) but in the final year had to show savings of 30% of HR costs. The military who were on project while it was busy were all getting redeployed to other projects, those vacancies were all carried and advertised right up until the point where savings had to be made at which point we cancelled every single one and made 38% savings without spending a penny less. Again, that’s locally controlled budgets not centrally reported actual spending.
I really don’t find it a challenge to expect that every single trust spent far too long saving money without actually thinking too hard about it right up to the point where there was no time or opportunity to actually investigate real life savings or better practices. Only when the time was reached where it became clear that this cutting wasn’t ending and savings were actually meaning real redundancies and losses in service could management look for ways to do stuff better but they couldn’t afford the changes.
Internally the Civil Service has managed its own inefficiencies far too well for far too long and, thanks in part to the ‘old boy network’ and the inability to recruit the more radical minds changes in funding will not provide solutions. Give them more and they will re-recruit some losses they didn’t want to make, cut some more and they can’t afford to revolutionise.
Apologies for typing, Arthritis is hitting my hands heavy this week….
I'm Autistic, if I say something you find offensive, please let me know, I can guarantee it was unintentional.
I'll try to give my honest opinion but am always open to learning.Mark
Kezo
I agree with you that some of what Mitch said is correct but the conclusion he comes to is wrong as per my last post. The current government have been in power since 2010 and in that time public services of all kinds have deteriorated.
You can’t blame anyone other than this government for that as they have chosen to deliberately degrade these services by starving them of resources. I am not surprised people have had enough and are fearful of the privatisation of the NHS.That is why support for the Tories is in free fall. If Labour had behaved in the same way I would be equally damning about them to, but this mess has been created solidly by the current lot.
Below is a graph from the Institute of Fiscal studies used in last nights Question time. It shows why the NHS is in the mess it’s in. I would argue that no healthcare system, whether public or private financed could cope with that kind of deliberately diminished funding level.
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