I am probably going to be leaving this comment, or a variation thereof, on articles and chats for the next few years, but here goes:
The problem with refunding the health service is that there are now fewer resources available to pay for health care. This is the case because we shut down the economy for a year and a half. (“If you don’t make stuff, you don’t have stuff.”) Attempts at pump-priming a supply-side recession will only result in rising prices – something we have been seeing.
So if you attempt to raise taxes to pay for more healthcare, you will be taxing people who are already seeing their cost of living rising. They will be made poorer.
It was stupid to shut down the economy for a year and a half. It will have consequences for some time to come. And by ‘consequences’ I mean deaths. Actual, quantifiable, deaths: Costs and Benefits of Lockdown (2): Translating GDP into human lives – Graham Stull
Let’s remember this the next time we are told to shut down our economy because of some halfwit’s epidemiological model.
George Knight
2 years ago
Thank you for a good article. Quite some time ago I worked as a management consultant for a private hospital chain operating in the UK. The management challenged us to reduce costs for operations without reducing the high quality of care they delivered. To their surprise we actually managed to increase their cost-effectiveness whilst not increasing risk. During our consignment we dealt with managers and clinicians who all shared a can-do attitude and a willingness to embrace new ways of working. I wonder, would this be the case in the NHS? Somehow I doubt it and therein lies a big problem.
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
It is sad to see a Conservative government’s main strategy for the NHS is to throw more money in (or away).
For a very long time, I have felt that a symptom of severe problems in this country is that we find it necessary to find doctors and nurses from other countries. Quite apart from the doubtful morality of doing so, it is surely better that English is the first language. Don’t other countries manage this basic thing? When did we stop doing so?
So; policy #1; train many more clinical staff – no loans, but include a period of mandatory service. If we employ enough, that in itself will surely make the job less stressful, and easier to cope with part-time doctors. (In addition, I suspect the change in the training of nurses has added to our problems.)
Policy #2; have plenty of beds. Build extra wards, including convalescent wards. I believe that false economy triumphs over and over.
Policy #3; stop and reverse if feasible the reorganisation caused by lumping together different establishments and then closing departments in some of them. During one course of treatment, we had to visit, at various times, 5 of our 6 connected local hospitals. It was clearly for the convenience of the consultant, since it was anything but, for us, and would have been very difficult by public transport. I have to conclude that the consultant habitually worked in all locations, but presumably claimed travelling expenses, and was perhaps paid his travelling time.
Policy #4. Remove levels of management and return power wholly to clinicians, supported of course by professional staff such as accountants, secretarial, IT and maintenance engineers.
We should have a commission to examine how a number of other countries which appear to achieve better health care than us for comparable cost, and simply copy it, but I don’t think the existing political parties will ever have the courage.
Last edited 2 years ago by Colin Elliott
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
Britain is so fortunate to have other countries with an abundance of trained nurses available for Javid.
Edward De Beukelaer
2 years ago
The main causes for ill-health are: poor housing, poor education, poor food (=modern farming food which equals poor nutrition and therefore poor immune systems and chronic illness) and other pollutions. If real efforts were to be made in these areas, there will less pressure on the NHS.
At the same time change medicine from being an XL sheet occupation, organised to nourish an industry of health, to a system that is interested in making people healthy.
The current medicine model is completely unaffordable: no money will ever be able to pay for it however many people you train or money you throw at it.
michael stanwick
2 years ago
And in an article written by Javid in The telegraph, he mentions “social justice” in relation to “levelling up” the access to treatment of certain demographics based on identity markers such as age, ethnicity and deprivation.
Now “levelling up” when seen in the light of “social justice” could be a euphemism for ‘equity’, of the sort that is an enforced redistribution of resources. So with the workforce resource bottleneck, how would such a redistribution come about?
timt56
2 years ago
Could Amy Jones by any chance be an NHS doctor? Why does every paragraph here appear to require an extra sentence:’And therefore the government should stop interfering in the NHS and just send in more and more and more money (and we doctors can decide best how to share it out’?
Disappointing from ‘UnHerd’, as these self serving views are endlessly heard, online, in newspapers, and particularly in their letters columns. Let us rather hear from someone who can throw light on the awful management of resources within the NHS and how real change could be made to happen.
.. NHS absenteeism seems rife. And many of those who did turn up can’t have been as busy as constantly portrayed by their PR agency (aka the BBC) given the reduction in hospital treatments during the pandemic. And fancy an organisation with over one million employees needing help from a few thousand soldiers. Shameful.
1
Yes, and amazingly nobody appears to see this obvious logic. Knowing lots of NHS nurses and doctors who sat around during the pandemic whilst the NHS was closed for business. Recognising that not all trusts were as pathetic. And any can-do attitude had to be imported in via the military who were trained to ‘adapt and overcome’. Yes, shameful.
Why don’t you provide evidence of where all this money is wasted then? We have spent much less in terms of GDP than most other first world nations for a very long time now, and it’s finally coming back to bite us
James Joyce
2 years ago
Is the NHS really Britain’s most beloved institution? If so, why?
It is often said that the UK is not a country (or 4 countries, 3.5 countries) but a failed NHS masquerading as a country. Is it really beloved?
More tosh from Anonymous Amy. NO reason she couldn’t put her name on this. Stop hiding, Amy. Time to put on your big girl pants and stop hiding. And for consistency, I also object to UnHerd permitting anonymity to the business guy in the article on Peloton. Without a really compelling reason, anonymous sources/writers should not be routinely allowed.
Why shouldn’t anonymity be allowed? How else are you supposed to get an inside perspective of these organisations if you don’t allow the writer to keep their identity secret for fear of reprisals?
Or is it simply the fact she has different ideas on the problems and solutions to the problems in the health service, so you want to shut her down (cancel her if you will)?
I am probably going to be leaving this comment, or a variation thereof, on articles and chats for the next few years, but here goes:
The problem with refunding the health service is that there are now fewer resources available to pay for health care. This is the case because we shut down the economy for a year and a half. (“If you don’t make stuff, you don’t have stuff.”) Attempts at pump-priming a supply-side recession will only result in rising prices – something we have been seeing.
So if you attempt to raise taxes to pay for more healthcare, you will be taxing people who are already seeing their cost of living rising. They will be made poorer.
It was stupid to shut down the economy for a year and a half. It will have consequences for some time to come. And by ‘consequences’ I mean deaths. Actual, quantifiable, deaths:
Costs and Benefits of Lockdown (2): Translating GDP into human lives – Graham Stull
Let’s remember this the next time we are told to shut down our economy because of some halfwit’s epidemiological model.
Thank you for a good article. Quite some time ago I worked as a management consultant for a private hospital chain operating in the UK. The management challenged us to reduce costs for operations without reducing the high quality of care they delivered. To their surprise we actually managed to increase their cost-effectiveness whilst not increasing risk. During our consignment we dealt with managers and clinicians who all shared a can-do attitude and a willingness to embrace new ways of working. I wonder, would this be the case in the NHS? Somehow I doubt it and therein lies a big problem.
It is sad to see a Conservative government’s main strategy for the NHS is to throw more money in (or away).
For a very long time, I have felt that a symptom of severe problems in this country is that we find it necessary to find doctors and nurses from other countries. Quite apart from the doubtful morality of doing so, it is surely better that English is the first language. Don’t other countries manage this basic thing? When did we stop doing so?
So; policy #1; train many more clinical staff – no loans, but include a period of mandatory service. If we employ enough, that in itself will surely make the job less stressful, and easier to cope with part-time doctors. (In addition, I suspect the change in the training of nurses has added to our problems.)
Policy #2; have plenty of beds. Build extra wards, including convalescent wards. I believe that false economy triumphs over and over.
Policy #3; stop and reverse if feasible the reorganisation caused by lumping together different establishments and then closing departments in some of them. During one course of treatment, we had to visit, at various times, 5 of our 6 connected local hospitals. It was clearly for the convenience of the consultant, since it was anything but, for us, and would have been very difficult by public transport. I have to conclude that the consultant habitually worked in all locations, but presumably claimed travelling expenses, and was perhaps paid his travelling time.
Policy #4. Remove levels of management and return power wholly to clinicians, supported of course by professional staff such as accountants, secretarial, IT and maintenance engineers.
We should have a commission to examine how a number of other countries which appear to achieve better health care than us for comparable cost, and simply copy it, but I don’t think the existing political parties will ever have the courage.
Britain is so fortunate to have other countries with an abundance of trained nurses available for Javid.
The main causes for ill-health are: poor housing, poor education, poor food (=modern farming food which equals poor nutrition and therefore poor immune systems and chronic illness) and other pollutions. If real efforts were to be made in these areas, there will less pressure on the NHS.
At the same time change medicine from being an XL sheet occupation, organised to nourish an industry of health, to a system that is interested in making people healthy.
The current medicine model is completely unaffordable: no money will ever be able to pay for it however many people you train or money you throw at it.
And in an article written by Javid in The telegraph, he mentions “social justice” in relation to “levelling up” the access to treatment of certain demographics based on identity markers such as age, ethnicity and deprivation.
Now “levelling up” when seen in the light of “social justice” could be a euphemism for ‘equity’, of the sort that is an enforced redistribution of resources. So with the workforce resource bottleneck, how would such a redistribution come about?
Could Amy Jones by any chance be an NHS doctor? Why does every paragraph here appear to require an extra sentence:’And therefore the government should stop interfering in the NHS and just send in more and more and more money (and we doctors can decide best how to share it out’?
Disappointing from ‘UnHerd’, as these self serving views are endlessly heard, online, in newspapers, and particularly in their letters columns. Let us rather hear from someone who can throw light on the awful management of resources within the NHS and how real change could be made to happen.
.. NHS absenteeism seems rife. And many of those who did turn up can’t have been as busy as constantly portrayed by their PR agency (aka the BBC) given the reduction in hospital treatments during the pandemic. And fancy an organisation with over one million employees needing help from a few thousand soldiers. Shameful.
1
Yes, and amazingly nobody appears to see this obvious logic. Knowing lots of NHS nurses and doctors who sat around during the pandemic whilst the NHS was closed for business. Recognising that not all trusts were as pathetic. And any can-do attitude had to be imported in via the military who were trained to ‘adapt and overcome’. Yes, shameful.
Why don’t you provide evidence of where all this money is wasted then? We have spent much less in terms of GDP than most other first world nations for a very long time now, and it’s finally coming back to bite us
Is the NHS really Britain’s most beloved institution? If so, why?
It is often said that the UK is not a country (or 4 countries, 3.5 countries) but a failed NHS masquerading as a country. Is it really beloved?
More tosh from Anonymous Amy. NO reason she couldn’t put her name on this. Stop hiding, Amy. Time to put on your big girl pants and stop hiding. And for consistency, I also object to UnHerd permitting anonymity to the business guy in the article on Peloton. Without a really compelling reason, anonymous sources/writers should not be routinely allowed.
Why shouldn’t anonymity be allowed? How else are you supposed to get an inside perspective of these organisations if you don’t allow the writer to keep their identity secret for fear of reprisals?
Or is it simply the fact she has different ideas on the problems and solutions to the problems in the health service, so you want to shut her down (cancel her if you will)?