Sunday, April 23, 2006
NHS
The money addicts: its your money they are gambling with
Never mind the patient just tick the box
It's the great NHS spending party - patients not invited
Pay for nurses and surgeons doubles NHS overspend
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I worked in the NHS for 1 year in the early 70s. I think I am entitled on this basis to make the claim the NHS is more a job creation scheme than a medical service and had been so since its inception.
The unions leaders, who are needed to protect their workers from low wages and to ptotect their health and safety at work, still have the sort of views unreconstructed characters we might have come across in "Im all right Jack" starring Peter Sellars would spout. When did you ever see/hear a to-camera piece with a health union official saying, the patients must come first?
The recent furore over money wasted is only a matter of degree. For some inexplicable reason (doh...) the New Labour government has seen fit to pump even more vaste amounts of money, the sort of money that would keep a Third World country afloat for another year, or at a pinch its nomenclatura in black Mercedes and flights to foreign capitals for shopping sprees, without first setting up a system to make sure it didn't simply disappear down the hole the rest of the money wnet down.
To say that the mangemet that has strangled the NHS was put in palce to achieve this novble aim is bollocks of a monumenbtal nature. they are there because people who spend tax payers money can always find new ways to spend it.
Picking on individaul historical problems within the NHS at random, I chose firstly, the nurses. Mostly of them very nice, and I've know a few. But when they transferred from on-the-job training to a "degree" in nursing, they effectively destroyed the nursing profession as if was established by, who, someone or other.
The nurse with a degree was taught everything but how to make beds, empty bedpans, tend to superating wounds, turns demented patients with bed sores, and ultimately tie up the dead in whire sheets. Nursy now saw herself (and many traditionally trained nurses left at the stage when this training system was being overhalled and new degeed nurses started to enter employment with the NHS) s some above the bread and butter issue of patient care and more as a secondary doctor. With their skillful indoctination in all maters sociolical and feminist, this was inevitable.
The logic of translating the nursing trining into an academic subject was presiumably inescable for the bureaucracy in charge: it probably involved the persuasion that this new course would encourage more to join nursing training. it failed to deal with the essnetial problem which we can now see at our leisure: the distancing of the nurse from the patient (except in the form of the nursing auxillary, who appears to do the real nursing now).
The resut was many good nurses resigning then coming back in white uniforms as agency staff on twice the pay. The downside was a loss of accountability and the slow erosion of the ethos which was part of the NHS nursing. An agency nurse would come or not according to whim: tired, hang over tempory job elsewhere..
// posted by Adfero Affero @ Sunday, April 23, 2006 
