Le_Fromage_Grande wrote:
My wife used to be a senior manager at North Middlesex Hospital, that's were my insights come from.
If the purchasing was done nationally you could reap the benefits of mass buying power.
Has the NHS got a single computer system yet?
If GPs were part of the same organisation as hospitals there wouldn't be the funding issue of "who's budget does the treatment come out of"
If the NHS were a single organisation there wouldn't be issued with care when patients need to go from one hospital to another.
I’ve no idea what a senior manager is I’m afraid, and I’ve been working in the NHS for a while. I don’t want to bias my views of your comment from my own experience, but anyone with ‘senior’ in their title tends to be anything but.
National procurement is a nice idea, but it is miles from the reality of localised need. A really quick example: impoverished areas tend to need greater social care support ( housing and that type of thing) and the associated health support that goes with it. People in Islington might be pissed if they have to have 50% of the procurement allocation for something they just don’t need. The minute you stop thinking of the NHS as a single organisation, the better. The emergence of integrated health systems will help in this space, particularly when you consider funding is being centrally devolved to them.
Following on from more than one system- the NHS couldn’t sustain a ‘single computer system’ and any thought to the contrary is folly- perhaps a few more technical qualifications would help you understand this? The thought of having surgery, community care, mental health, children’s services etc etc all on a single system is madness from both a usability and reporting perspective.
What we do have no is more and more integrated systems, with more organisations moving away from behemoth installed base garden-walled electronic records systems to more openEHR. The fluidity of health and care demands systems that can cope with chance, which ‘one system’ won’t.
This is a reasonable answer though and won’t fit the ‘NHS is run by bastards’ narrative you seem keen to subscribe to.
That's just off the top of my head, the NHS is a great idea, but it appears the people running it are clueless.
Like that.
I will say, again, that the position in England is worse than elsewhere due to years of competitive commissioning. It can do more to learn from what’s working well.
I've possibly got more higher education than you, but it wasn't from the state - it's all technical education.
I’ve no idea what the state has to do with this and it’s more than likely the neighbourhood squirrel has ‘more higher education’ (sic) than me. The point stands, it would appear the more broadly educated a person is, the greater the likelihood they’ll be left leaning. It’s no fluke; you get to learn how to critique and appraise and then make more informed choices.
And what do you do that's socialist, from what I've seen in here you're happy for lorry drivers to get poorly paid so long as you get cheap coffee, not very left wing of you.
I’m really not happy for lorry drivers to get poorly paid - where have I said that? I even think I stated that the arguement of ‘if they don’t like the pay they can get another job’ ( as is the typical arrow fired at nurses for example) was nonsense.
Here:
This is Twitter, so will get Iccy’s back up straight away, but it’s the Torygraph with an own-goal headline. A bit like suggesting everyone who works at a newspaper needs to be a journalist or everyone who lives at Buckingham Palace needs to be the queen or everyone who works at an airline needs to be a pilot.
Here is a good response from the many who have pointed out to the Telegraph it’s a load of twaddle: