The NHS is not run for the benefit of patients, but its staff. It is Stalinist in its approach to criticism and bends facts to suit its own agenda. It is run by an overpaid cartel of bureaucrats who would not survive in any other organisation. It is completely unaccountable and spends a fortune in litigation defending the indefensible.
It’s time that the rug was pulled from under the cosy cartel who are perpetuating this mess.
That assessment is spot on. I worked in the NHS and I am almost ashamed of the fact.
It is the one of greatest con-tricks ever perpetrated on the British people. It is supported by the Labour party because no matter how poor the service, it is a socialist model, and therefore ideologically beyond reproach, and it is useful stick with which to beat the right.
So far as the Conservatives are concerned, the only way to avoid damaging press headlines is to appear more pro-NHS than Labour. Anything less than slavish devotion is greeted by shrieks of they’re going to club the baby seal
Jeremy Bray
2 years ago
It is always easier to pontificate from the sidelines than actually accomplish something useful in reforming the bureaucratic monstrosity the NHS has become.
The fatal flaw of the NHS was that we nationalised healthcare and not health insurance. A lot of people seem unable to distinguish between the latter and the American system, and yet in most of the world it works well enough to ensure decent healthcare that isn’t run like Gosplan.
In the last few months I’ve seen both a family member treated for cancer in France, and a colleague treated for a serious condition in the Cornish NHS. The former, prompt, effective; fantastic. The latter – patchy, including the forgetting of pain relief after an operation. Just what I’ve seen personally but it does seem to chime with others experiences.
Indeed. I and family have experienced good treatment almost simultaneously with ridiculous wasteful inefficiency. The people seem consistently competent and caring (although we’re not impressed by our GPs, lately). The systems seem labyrinthine, slow and frustrating, and probably seem so to the staff, too.
Last edited 2 years ago by Colin Elliott
Davy Humerme
2 years ago
Can’t disagree with Amy on any of this. Very well put and it’s instructive to look at his abysmal record. One aspect I noticed about Hunt which makes him a poor political leader. Saint Jeremy has a sanctimonious Blairesque sense of his own destiny and a ruthlessness which would shame Frances Urqhuart. His attempt to throw the hapless chair of the JCVI under the bus at the select committee session on Covid response. This was because of their refusal to recommend the vaccination of minors. The fact that the Public Health zealots overruled their well deliberated evidenced decision in any case, showed he was about blame. This all portrayed behind a facade of brittle , passive- aggressive impatience, reminding me of too many of of our underpowered but over-entitled political class.
GA Woolley
2 years ago
Amy Jones might also have mentioned that PHE, with a staff of 5000 and a budget of millions, was set up by Hunt’s department, and run for 5 years while he was head, and that part of its mission statement was to anticipate major outbreaks of infectious diseases and direct the response to them. Of all the health organisations which failed, PHE failed most spectacularly.
Peter LR
2 years ago
I saw the article was by him so didn’t read it as a consequence. It’s strange how elites reward failure; in his case allowing him to chair the Health Committee and assuming he has wisdom from experience. Is there any way we can break this throttle-hold which appoints people because they are reliable: that is, they can be relied on not to challenge the status quo?
Tim Duckworth
2 years ago
And, above all the dreadful failure indicators listed , there is no mention of the Cygnus exercise with its description of the state of readiness to face a pandemic
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
I’ve long thought Hunt has a brass neck to dare to criticise. It’s not that what he says is necessarily wrong, it’s the fact that he has proved that he did no better than recent incumbents when he had the chance.
His civil servants congratulated themselves on having amongst the best anti-epidemic precautions in the world; no, they didn’t.
It’s clear that we don’t have enough hospital beds or train enough doctors and nurses. He was responsible for health policies for six years, so qualifies uniquely amongst politicians for failing to correct these.
jonathan carter-meggs
2 years ago
Encourage a parallel insurance system backed by government so that more people can afford to go private?
That’s very appealing, in the hope the good system would eventually drive out the bad. But an incoming Labour government would remove the insurance option, or downgrade it. The whole system has to change, especially to ensure the poor and old do not get left behind in an intended gradualist approach
If the solvent, literate, articulate, capable people go private the NHS patients will be the residue. What sort of service will be the result of there being no-one even capable of complaining?
There would be a BBC/Guardian/Labour/etc campaign accusing the government of ‘privatising the NHS’, which is a charge considered worse than treason.
Jasper Carrot
2 years ago
It can oft be said of many other government departments, where secretaries of state/ministers have no, or very limited, experience of the portfolio which they are gifted. The NHS is a continuing embarrassment & like much else in respect of governance needs systemic reform.
Kieran Saxon
2 years ago
Another great article. I just laughed when Jeremy Hunt lead an investigation into COVID that basically decided that everything would have been better if we’d started two weeks earlier.
Ted Ditchburn
2 years ago
I am not in any way an expert in Health…but when he was in the Media Department he oversaw what was already a mad dog’s dinner of an idea that John Prescott had for local or *hyper local news* and turned it into a dogs dinner of an idea that had been vomited up by another dog before the industry had to eat it. There was a laudable aim of creating small, local, non-corporate mini-broadcasters accountable to small local companies made up of *locals* and not-for-profits, charities or whatever.
This was bang in my career space so I read all the stuff and went to all the meetings, including the industry one where Jeremy H did his best Tony B shirtsleeved impression of boundless energy and enthusiasm trying to sell the biggest crock of the proverbial as a great idea.
Predictably all sorts of chancers tried to pile in..and with the horrible *corporates* (like say a Regional ITV company, or foreign *City TV* broadcaster almost axiomatically excluded the chancers and the enthusiastic but bewildered non broadcasters got most of the licenses.
Nobody watches it, it is a colossal waste of money and should never have been *broadcast TV* as internet TV even all those years ago was doing a decent job of providing hyper local news offerings.
So it wasn’t just Health where he played the competent business consultant type of !deas-Meister, but with no actual idea of how the world he wanted his ideas to live in, actually works.
Ann Ceely
2 years ago
Jeremy Hunt was such a two-faced Minister for the NHS that we can see he would, and did, blame everybody but himself.
It’s politicians like him that make me want a Private Health Service.
The NHS is not run for the benefit of patients, but its staff. It is Stalinist in its approach to criticism and bends facts to suit its own agenda. It is run by an overpaid cartel of bureaucrats who would not survive in any other organisation. It is completely unaccountable and spends a fortune in litigation defending the indefensible.
It’s time that the rug was pulled from under the cosy cartel who are perpetuating this mess.
That assessment is spot on. I worked in the NHS and I am almost ashamed of the fact.
It is the one of greatest con-tricks ever perpetrated on the British people. It is supported by the Labour party because no matter how poor the service, it is a socialist model, and therefore ideologically beyond reproach, and it is useful stick with which to beat the right.
So far as the Conservatives are concerned, the only way to avoid damaging press headlines is to appear more pro-NHS than Labour. Anything less than slavish devotion is greeted by shrieks of they’re going to club the baby seal
It is always easier to pontificate from the sidelines than actually accomplish something useful in reforming the bureaucratic monstrosity the NHS has become.
The most sensible headline in years.
Yes, perfectly put
The fatal flaw of the NHS was that we nationalised healthcare and not health insurance. A lot of people seem unable to distinguish between the latter and the American system, and yet in most of the world it works well enough to ensure decent healthcare that isn’t run like Gosplan.
In the last few months I’ve seen both a family member treated for cancer in France, and a colleague treated for a serious condition in the Cornish NHS. The former, prompt, effective; fantastic. The latter – patchy, including the forgetting of pain relief after an operation. Just what I’ve seen personally but it does seem to chime with others experiences.
Indeed. I and family have experienced good treatment almost simultaneously with ridiculous wasteful inefficiency. The people seem consistently competent and caring (although we’re not impressed by our GPs, lately). The systems seem labyrinthine, slow and frustrating, and probably seem so to the staff, too.
Can’t disagree with Amy on any of this. Very well put and it’s instructive to look at his abysmal record. One aspect I noticed about Hunt which makes him a poor political leader. Saint Jeremy has a sanctimonious Blairesque sense of his own destiny and a ruthlessness which would shame Frances Urqhuart. His attempt to throw the hapless chair of the JCVI under the bus at the select committee session on Covid response. This was because of their refusal to recommend the vaccination of minors. The fact that the Public Health zealots overruled their well deliberated evidenced decision in any case, showed he was about blame. This all portrayed behind a facade of brittle , passive- aggressive impatience, reminding me of too many of of our underpowered but over-entitled political class.
Amy Jones might also have mentioned that PHE, with a staff of 5000 and a budget of millions, was set up by Hunt’s department, and run for 5 years while he was head, and that part of its mission statement was to anticipate major outbreaks of infectious diseases and direct the response to them. Of all the health organisations which failed, PHE failed most spectacularly.
I saw the article was by him so didn’t read it as a consequence. It’s strange how elites reward failure; in his case allowing him to chair the Health Committee and assuming he has wisdom from experience. Is there any way we can break this throttle-hold which appoints people because they are reliable: that is, they can be relied on not to challenge the status quo?
And, above all the dreadful failure indicators listed , there is no mention of the Cygnus exercise with its description of the state of readiness to face a pandemic
I’ve long thought Hunt has a brass neck to dare to criticise. It’s not that what he says is necessarily wrong, it’s the fact that he has proved that he did no better than recent incumbents when he had the chance.
His civil servants congratulated themselves on having amongst the best anti-epidemic precautions in the world; no, they didn’t.
It’s clear that we don’t have enough hospital beds or train enough doctors and nurses. He was responsible for health policies for six years, so qualifies uniquely amongst politicians for failing to correct these.
Encourage a parallel insurance system backed by government so that more people can afford to go private?
That’s very appealing, in the hope the good system would eventually drive out the bad. But an incoming Labour government would remove the insurance option, or downgrade it. The whole system has to change, especially to ensure the poor and old do not get left behind in an intended gradualist approach
If the solvent, literate, articulate, capable people go private the NHS patients will be the residue. What sort of service will be the result of there being no-one even capable of complaining?
There would be a BBC/Guardian/Labour/etc campaign accusing the government of ‘privatising the NHS’, which is a charge considered worse than treason.
It can oft be said of many other government departments, where secretaries of state/ministers have no, or very limited, experience of the portfolio which they are gifted. The NHS is a continuing embarrassment & like much else in respect of governance needs systemic reform.
Another great article. I just laughed when Jeremy Hunt lead an investigation into COVID that basically decided that everything would have been better if we’d started two weeks earlier.
I am not in any way an expert in Health…but when he was in the Media Department he oversaw what was already a mad dog’s dinner of an idea that John Prescott had for local or *hyper local news* and turned it into a dogs dinner of an idea that had been vomited up by another dog before the industry had to eat it. There was a laudable aim of creating small, local, non-corporate mini-broadcasters accountable to small local companies made up of *locals* and not-for-profits, charities or whatever.
This was bang in my career space so I read all the stuff and went to all the meetings, including the industry one where Jeremy H did his best Tony B shirtsleeved impression of boundless energy and enthusiasm trying to sell the biggest crock of the proverbial as a great idea.
Predictably all sorts of chancers tried to pile in..and with the horrible *corporates* (like say a Regional ITV company, or foreign *City TV* broadcaster almost axiomatically excluded the chancers and the enthusiastic but bewildered non broadcasters got most of the licenses.
Nobody watches it, it is a colossal waste of money and should never have been *broadcast TV* as internet TV even all those years ago was doing a decent job of providing hyper local news offerings.
So it wasn’t just Health where he played the competent business consultant type of !deas-Meister, but with no actual idea of how the world he wanted his ideas to live in, actually works.
Jeremy Hunt was such a two-faced Minister for the NHS that we can see he would, and did, blame everybody but himself.
It’s politicians like him that make me want a Private Health Service.