There’s a continuous ‘drip drip’ of stuff, prominently from the BBC who couldn’t run a bath when it comes to accurate reporting of anything to do with the NHS or related matters. We hear terms as “the NHS is unsustainable” when people mean “underfunded”, and we hear some parts of West London are “changing” rather than being closed down.
One of the other massive myths is that people couldn’t care about healthcare, and they think all the time about the economy. If that were true, the “feel good” factor would have returned, and we’d all be thinking about prosperity. Except in real life, the cost of living has been an entirely foreseeable consequence of a big corporates running everything. We don’t have a smaller state, we just have an outsourced state, with everything costing the earth.
Anybody wishing to protect a local hospital is lambasted by an expert commentator as a NIMBYist. GPs and nurses are told perpetually to do things quicker and faster and less. It would be like giving a contestant of the ‘Great British Bake Off’ only a bag of flour, and demanding a decorated cake within an hour. Likewise, nobody gave this Government permission for the “Great British Sell Off”. Payback time.
It’s as if the NHS constitution doesn’t exist sometimes. The NHS can be ‘universal’, and yet at the same not to be offering varicose vein extractions free at the point of need. The current Government often spin the phrase, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, and yet private providers can hide behind the cloak of freedom of information protection, and private providers can trade using the NHS logo.
Last time, what happened was a disgrace. Nobody knew that Andrew Lansley’s vanity piece of legislation to turbo-boost the transfer of resources to the private sector was imminent. There was no mention of it in the Coalition Agreement, which promised enhanced powers to PCTs.
And all of it feels, on one hand, like a giant experiment. That NHS car parks and ambulances are being contracted out to private providers who are simply concerned about the bottom line, and the stroke reconfiguration is based on solid reconfiguration towards centralised centres of excellence.
Non-medical people are often perplexed why it doesn’t matter how long it takes to drive a patient to a stroke centre. That’s because in fact it hugely does. In the space of driving past a local centre which might deliver the appropriate drug and monitor you 24/7, with access to a multidisciplinary team, the “shadow” of the part of the stroke, for example in a type of stroke where lack of oxygen is causing death of brain tissue, is getting bigger. And time matters. This is borne out by decades of evidence.
But this is what happens when the health debate becomes distorted by the media reporting on the views of people without a basic medicine or science degree. And all of it is entirely plausible when the primary driver of health service reform is liberalising the market from people like Oliver Letwin, whose other big turkey is “The Big Society”. That was a big experiment, and another big fiasco.
If politics means anything at all, politicians should be accountable. People often wonder whether Labour was truly held accountable for its NHS Foundation Trust policy, and the part of history when it implemented PFI, as well as when the country went to war against Iraq. But on the other hand, Andy Burnham potentially can fight the forces of evil at play who have taken the NHS debate down the blind alley of competition and quality.
NHS campaigners are furious, and have every right to be. Labour cannot afford to be complacent. Far from it, with most people thinking that Labour will be the largest party if it cannot win an outright majority, it will matter who Labour gets into bed with. And NHS issues, certainly if Andy Slaughter and West London are anything to go by, will matter, as well as the decimation of social care.
The old adage goes, “Who cares about care?”. We’re about to find out.
