How Politicians set out to destroy the NHS

Subject:	How Politicians set out to destroy the NHS
Date:	Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:34:50 +0000

How Politicians set out to destroy the NHS

Robert Henderson

It is noteworthy that the hospitals in trouble at present all seem to
be those converted into Trusts. This means they are less subject to
normal NHS disciplines. Add in the privatisation of cleaning and meals
services and the vast increase in agency nursing staff (both of which
remove the sense of a community and public service in a hospital as well
as being hideously inefficient because no one authority has overall
control), the introduction of the bogus internal market, the outsourcing
of NHS work to private clinics, the import of large numbers of doctors
and nurses from outside Britain whose English is quite inadequate for
the job, the removal of nurses' primary training from hospitals, an
obsession with targets and a general drive by government to treat the
NHS as a business rather than a public service and you have the recipe
for why the NHS has declined from its previous high levels of
excellence.

Those old enough to remember what the NHS was like before Thatcher came
to power will know where the blame lies for its decline: firmly in her
lap and those she inspired to follow her lead. The NHS worked
magnificently when it was simply treated as what it was intended to be,
a public service.

What is needed is a return to the NHS as a national service, with a
uniformity of rules throughout the country. No more allowing different
health authorities to choose how to spend money so that patients are e
offered differing opportunities for treatment in different places.
Cleaning and catering should be brought back in-house. Britons should
employed wherever possible, so no more situations where thousands of
British doctors and nurses cannot get jobs. Immigrant nurses and
doctors, where needed, to be subject to much more stringent language and
qualification tests. Outsourcing of NHS work to private companies should
cease. Private healthcare providers in Britain should not be allowed to
use NHS facilities, be forced to pay the full cost of any medical
mistakes they make which have to be remedied by the NHS, be subject to
rigorous state inspections, and pay a tax to help fund the training of
medical staff. RH
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Robert Henderson
Personal website: http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk