If you’re referring to health then you’re quite simply wrong mate. Patient satisfaction and waiting list KPI’s were at record levels in 2010, 8 years of Tory austerity have taken their toll on both, as I said, it’s not even a debate.
See I worked in regeneration and my first roles were feasibility studies in various projects. The fact was that a lot of "good" projects were a waste of money and not sustainable coming about as a result of monies available that everyone was competing for. Community centres and surestart type projects were worse as the money involved was huge But smaller projects like disability mentoring, ethnic minority health projects and MIND ones were wastes of money but not PC to say so
London seems to have a problem because London has a population more than twice Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Newcastle & Edinburgh combined
Fair enough if uiu dot want to discuss it. And I'm just going by my experience I do agree austerity has had a bad effect in general and that's clear. But NHS specifically is about wastage and I for one would argue fix that before asking people to pay more in tax
I've mentioned this before on here so I won't go into huge detail, but in a nutshell, commissioning across the Dept of Health now includes private companies to deliver health care who tend to cherry pick the cheap and easy parts of health service to deliver. So out of that one pot of money from the Dept of Health, less of it now goes to the NHS, who have to deal with an increasing demand, due to an ageing population with more complex health needs and greater expectations about access to new treatments and drugs etc. Money is absolutely at the root of this problem. The Tories want to sell it all off to private companies so that they can wash their hands of the 'problem' of funding it, and make some money for themselves and their rich donors in the process.
Fair enough. It's an interesting discussion for me. For me the whole "I'd pay more tax for the NHS" is a scary concept and one that won't fix anything
What wastage though ? The NHS is at breaking point and just about manages to operate, both being underfunded and understaffed. The cost efficiency savings I had to make when I was working in the NHS were crippling. What are these wastages you're talking about ?
Is that about needing more money or bad management though? That's betrie we consider how doctors are employed and how they take certain ops on the NHS and push others to private and mybown favourite the purchase of equipment that isn't used at all or the top consultants use it for their private clinics
Take your pick from procurement to consultant fees to the IT system fiasco to sick days (again about management)
It's about money mate. I think you'll find that there is very little procurement within the NHS nowadays that isn't interrogated to a high degree to determine whether it offers value for money. I had to jump through endless hoops to spend NHS money, and rightly so, it's public money at the end of the day. I don't doubt there was inefficient and wasteful spending in the past, but not now.
Sorry mate it's really not. Just look at the inability to.simply apply for money that we are eligible for, from migrants using the health service I guarantee if those in charge weren't paid out of the public purse they would chase down every penny
There have been some big IT gaffes I'll give you that. The problem with that is that the NHS is so big, that these systems have to work across huge swathes of the service. The staff all have to be trained, which takes time and money and often the software contracts are bought into for long periods. As a result, some of these IT systems are obsolete before they even become functional.
As for sickness in the NHS, it is a problem. I would argue that is down to overworked and under supported staff. The irony in the NHS is that there is actually very little care for the workforce.
There are often new devices/equipment which are purchased and either don't get used as no one is trained in them (locally recently these 3d MRI things for pregnant mums) or the nuring stafd reduse as they are not as efficient as what they have. The philosophy seems to be to buy whilst having money rather than say no wait. This stuff then gets sent abroad for 3rd world docs to use. Bit like Boris and his 300k water cannon
This I agree with BUT (sorry you knew it was coming though) and this is in public service providers generally imo, it's easy to milk it as it's almost impossible to get rid of folk
By the way the when tories and things getting worse @Archers Road and the whole secret privatisation is a given and something I believe is happening
It used to be the case that if I hadn't spent my budget by the time April came around, then any underspend was taken into account and taken off my next year budget, i.e. you only spent £1.2m out of your £1.8m budget so we only need to allocate £1.2 for the next year. I must admit that encouraged me to spend money that I didn't really need to, for fear of losing it for the next year. I think the NHS wised up to that though and realised that rather than it saving money, it encouraged loads of managers to spend more than they needed to. As for equipment procurement though, when I was last in the NHS, it was like trying to get blood out of a stone trying to get new equipment. You literally had to write a funding application (and I've done a few of those 40+ page applications for charitable funding schemes) and explain every aspect of why you needed something, how much it cost, whether it could be sourced cheaper elsewhere, how much use it would get, what were the implications of not having it, could an alternative be used, etc
