Who do you want to choose how your ailments are sorted a bureaucrat or a medical bod?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark
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Who do you want to choose how your ailments are sorted a bureaucrat or a medical bod?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark
My wife works for the PCT (for now, it's being abolished) so I can give you some insight here. When they decide whether to fund non-NICE treatments or exceptional cases not normally covered by the NHS, the panel consists of local GPs, clinicians, and where appropriate outside specialists. Now, my other half is what you could describe as a "bureaucrat" as she organises and minutes the panels. You could theoretically do away with her role, which you would no doubt describe as a "non-job". So now either these meetings don't take place, or the doctors and surgeons give up time they could be using for actual medical work to book meeting rooms, arrange transport and parking, coordinate diaries, take the minutes, etc etc etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bolton Midnight
Sorry if this goes against your entrenched opinion, but any large organisation needs its share of bureaucrats. I have absolutely no doubt that there's waste and inefficiencies in the system, but the system proposed by the coalition makes no sense whatsoever. Instead of the PCT providing this service, individual GPs will have to do it themselves. This means either (A) they take even more time away from patient care to do admin work, or (B) they buy the service in from a profit-making private provider. Instead of a network of local commissioning bodies we'll have hundreds, all with their own varying views on what should and shouldn't be funded, all requiring admin staff and facilities, and introducing a true postcode lottery. It's madness.
Odd that isn't it, folk in the real world manage to hold meetings all the time without somebody there to whet nurse them, and how many meetings does she have about the meetings?
The work that people like your other half do still has to be done. What is likely to happen is that they'll be employed by gp commissioning groups instead. Its just going to end up in management being taken out of one place and put into another.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave B
And maybe for a more realistic salary. The NHS salaries for pen pushers are far higher than equivalent jobs in private sector. So even if numbers were only slightly less the overall wage bill should be a lot less hurrah.
The folk protesting make me sick, if they were on more realistic wages then there wouldn't need to be as many job losses.
I see your link, and raise you:Quote:
Originally Posted by Bolton Midnight
TPA publish another flawed attempt at rubbishing the NHS | Liberal Conspiracy
Quote:
It is classic of TPA output in selectively presenting information to suit its conclusion.
The report title are those hypothecated as being “amenable to healthcare”, assuming that the “amenable mortality rate” for the UK can be measured against that for “selected European countries”.
The difference is then multiplied out to give a suitably large number, just over 11,500 for 2008.
This figure is then put forward, together with increased spending on the NHS between 2001 and 2011, and is held to prove that the NHS is not such A Good Thing and should therefore be reformed, although what a reformed system would look like is not told, possibly because the models followed in those “selected European countries” (the Netherlands, France and Spain) are all different.
There are a number of problems with this approach.
Firstly, as the TPA at least concedes, is the lifestyle factor, which is known to influence significantly life expectancy levels across the UK.
Second, the TPA seems unable to limit its comparison to the Netherlands, France and Spain, bringing in comparisons with Australia, Sweden, Norway, Canada and even Cuba.
And thirdly and potentially most important, the only country that has its healthcare spending examined in depth, together with productivity, pay and increases in frontline staff versus managers, is the UK.
The nearest the TPA gets to making a cost comparison is when they describe the system in Switzerland (yes, yet another comparator thrown in to the mix) as “expensive”.
So the NHS is getting rubbished by comparing it to systems across Europe and elsewhere, but there is no comparison of costs, just the inference that the NHS model is wrong and everyone else’s is better.
So what the TPA have presented is a partially researched hatchet job on the NHS, with sufficient information provided to fit the headline already written – rather like the Daily Mail, the kind of paper that eagerly churns over their press releases.
The sad reality is that informed debate on the NHS cannot be other than A Good Thing, but this is not it. It’s a waste of time.
As for these links, big wow. Nobody is denying - at least in this thread - that there's not waste and inefficiency in the NHS. It needs addressing, you'll get no argument from me. But the kind of reforms being enacted by the coalition (despite Cameron looking straight into a camera lens during the televised pre-election debates and promising no such thing) are not the answer. They'll create more admin and bureaucracy, not less.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bolton Midnight
Yet to be seen whether it does but even if it did create more jobs but with more realistic salaries for these peoples ability then that is a good thing no?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave B
Over paid, useless folk have no place within the NHS - sack em.