I remember my stay at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery as an inpatient.
Actually, I don’t remember hospital food being that bad. In fact, I can’t remember it at all. When the physiotherapists were teaching me how to walk again, and the speech and language therapists were teaching me how to speak again, after my six weeks in a coma due to meningitis, the quality of food was not top of my mind.
What did irk me was pressing the bedside buzzer, and occasionally people not answering. Or not knowing when the ‘investigations’ which I was down for were due to happen.
But I suppose I understand why Jeremy Hunt focuses on hospital food. I would be surprised if he’d spent a lengthy stay in hospital as an inpatient. I know he never studied medicine or nursing.
But having a headline on hospital food is either some weird denial of problems in the rest of the service, or a genuine desire to promote the quality of nutrition in inpatients.
Either way, what is aggravating is Jeremy Hunt’s steadfast refusal to explain what the point of the NHS reforms was.
We know it cost about £2 billion, at a time when the UK is supposed to be tightening its belt.
We know it led to a large number of contracts being awarded to the private sector.
We also know there is not a single clause on patient safety in the Health and Social Care Act (2012), which amounts to about five hundred pages, apart from the abolition of the National Patient Safety Agency.
But Jeremy Hunt clearly does not want to discuss the NHS reforms, despite the fact that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were determined to get this legislation through parliament.
He needs to explain to the English voter in what way the NHS reforms have improved the quality of the patient experience. Did I miss a clause on hospital food in the Health and Social Care Act?
Otherwise, this is a lunatic Government with a detached Secretary of State for Health who seems completely incapable of explaining the current policy on the NHS.
Lynton Crosby may not want to talk about the NHS, but he may find that mission quite unachievable as a huge army of people converge upon Trafalgar Square for the climax of the modern-day Jarrow March.
It could be that Jeremy Hunt feels that the average voter is too stupid to discuss the privatisation of the NHS, but can cope instead with a conversation about the quality and quantity of chips in an average NHS meal.
People do not go to hospitals for a great hôtel like experience, in the same way that people do not stay in hotels to get their hernias seen to.
In the run up to the general election, the opposition parties should maintain pressure on the Government to explain quite why they were so desperate to implement the costly NHS reforms. These reforms not only cost a lot of money, but further extended the democratic deficit between political parties and the average voter. It is clear that Andy Burnham MP as Shadow Secretary of State for Health has maintained his wish to repeal the ‘Lansley Act’, but the current Government should not be allowed to get away with its wish to talk about Douglas Carswell or terror alerts rather than the current state of the health service, aided and abetted by supine media organisations.
