Scottyboi said:
cibaman said:
Scottyboi said:
Disgraceful that graph, and the reason why we now have a generation who can only dream of being able to afford their own home.
Why can't all the parties elected work out a 20 year plan for the NHS and keep it out of any political debate. Each time a new government comes in they just restructure the whole thing no wonder there are so many fuck ups. Surely they could make it work if they really wanted to, but then that means labour giving up the only credible thing they have improved.
They can never de-politicise the NHS. Its too important. Whenever there's any sort of crisis, eg a flu pandemic, the government are going to be asked what
they are doing about it. Politicians will always get the blame if things go wrong in the NHS so, perhaps not surprisingly, they feel the need to meddle in it.
I don't agree with that, the question ''what are you doing about it'' should be asked to the NHS committee and if more money is required to deal with it all the parties can work together to find out how much and where it should come from. It's not hard really it's just parties like to use the NHS as a voting tactic. NATIONAL is the big word not Labour or Tory health service.
The reality is the NHS is almost completely broken.
The politicians don't dare say that because they think "everyone loves the NHS". I don't know anyone who loves it in its current state. We might love the *idea* of it, but the reality is the standard of care you get varies from "OK" to poor to downright attrocious and utterly disgraceful. There's waste, mismanagement, incompetence, laziness, couldn't give a toss attitude all over the place. Cancer survival rates are shocking compared to leading countries.
A simple example is my father-in-law who broke his hip last autumn. He went in for a fairly routine hip operation in Bristol Royal Infirmary and should have been out in a couple of weeks. He was there for 4 months. The last 2 months he was there because, frankly, no-one really cared about him nor the costs. His treatment was a catalogue of cock ups and mismanagement that had they occured in any private business, people would have been fired. Talking to MANY others on the 3 or 4 times a week visits we made, lots of people had similar experiences.
In short, the whole thing is a shambles and needs a completely new approach. It is too big in its current form for anyone to run the whole thing properly and the VERY WORST people to be running it are the government. Everything the government does turns to shit, be it wasted billions on stupid defence procurement contracts gone wrong, wasted billions on failed computer projects, wasted billions with thousands of paper shufflers in whitehall. I doubt many of you remember when the government ran the GPO (what subsequently became BT)? It took 3 months to get a phone connected when you moved house. Unless you were unlucky as I was, and didn't get one for over a year!!! That's the level of "service" you get when the government runs things. Council offices that shut at 4, aren't open weekends. Patient liaison officers that don't work Wednesdays. Doctors who flit in and out whenever they choose and spend 80% of their time lining their pockets in the private sector.
The government (Tory, Labour or otherwise) could not run a piss up in the proverbial brewery, yet we trust them to run the NHS. Utter madness. The whole thing should be put out of government control, like we've done with the bank of england - one of the few decent moves Labour actually did.
