My first visit to this new hospital, albeit delivering a friend for an op., gave me an long-for opportunity to snoop around. It is a bright and clean place, with layed-out garden and a fish-filled pond. But it is hell to get around. Once you have been there a few times, easier perhaps. I got the hang of it thesection of the maze I needed by retracing my steps a few times during the course of my wait, which lasted for about five hours. But as I said to my post-op., sore friend when he came out of the day clinic, the architectural team who designed the place must surely have hanged themself en masse when they realised the balls-up they had made of what was a standard design task. I challenge someone to do some video-ing of people movement around the place to demonstrate what an unnecessary warren it is. I'd bloody do it myself if I had a movie camera. Come on Anglia News and BBC Regional, fingers out.

Walking in the Plaza in the sunshine at the front of the hospital, people to-ing and fro-ing as if sautering across St. Mark's on a quick Venice break, I noticed there was a substantial and permantent-looking large white mobile, with a six foot fence around it, stuck on the outside of the Sir Arthur South Clinic where my friend was having his operation. Afterwards I taunted him with jibs along the lines of did your surgeon have a n accent a bit like P W Botha?" The "mobile" clinic/theatre is next to the shop inside one of a pair of rotundas one at each side of the building (the other holds a coffee shop).The name: Guardianhealth.co.uk, neatly stencilled on the top. As I was browsing the shop which had a wide variety of items including some gardening books on how to grow bonsais which caught my attention, I saw a local paper with the headlines "Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Trust...Scandal" on the cashiers desk. The few words I manged to read before having to move on concerned the business of a 700 bed hosital now housing over a 1000 patients.

My thoughts on what I had seen overall were pretty much what I had had before seeing the place and based soley on what I had read and seen on TV: that at all costs the health service must not be privatised by the back door. I do not think this from some sort of socialist principle. I don't see the poit od the edication system being under state control for example: most do nbot want to be educated in the way I understand it, so why not let them chose if thy want it or not. But health, water, the environment should all be government run.

In the case of the N & N well described by Bill Totten and any other PFI, we have the power to invoke laws which revoke the contracts and take our money back. This sort of talk is always poopoo-ed by the grisled experts (many who are earning a god living as eiher consultants or academics by so doing) in the various associated fields, but it could be done. The state took control of industries and then gave up ownership before.

Barclays in NHS rip-off scandal

Robert Lea, Evening Standard, 3 May 2006

lays out what the problem is. It is not beyond the collective brains of the British nation to work out an answer to this and nip this privatisation bonanza/gold-rush idiocy in the bud. We now have the propect of a Conservative government which, paradoxically to many, would have a better mindset to carry out the necessary radical changes to put this in order before chaos ensues.

Principle no. 1 "No individual should get rich at the expense of people's health".


other sources:

An Easter Egg Hunt George Monbiot 9 May 2006 in Znet

Thirty-fifth report: The refinancing of the Norfolk and Norwich PFI Hospital (HC 694)

Public Accounts Committee 2 May 2006

Norfolk and Norwich shelves iSoft PAS

Buy now pay later (a lot more, a lot later) By Ross Clark and Edward Simpkins, Telegraph, 7 May 2006