Let joy be unconfined. Sleeves rolled up, Keir Starmer promises to reform the NHS.
By the end of this Parliament, nine out of ten patients will only have to wait 18 weeks for treatment.
Yippee!
The news will come as blessed relief to the six million people currently waiting anything up to 18 months for 7.5 million routine operations.
The Government’s plans include opening more diagnostic centres, making better use of technology and forging a partnership with the private sector to speed up appointments.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? One day, perhaps the NHS will be the truly ‘World Class’ health care system of deluded politicians’ imagination. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
While any proposed improvements are welcome and long overdue, the timescale isn’t exactly ambitious. This Parliament is not due to expire until July 2029 and given Labour’s massive Commons majority is likely to last right up to the last knockings.
Even then, some patients will still be waiting 18 weeks for treatment. That’s more than four months. Hardly fast-track, especially for those suffering pain and discomfort.
One day, perhaps the NHS will be the truly ‘World Class’ health care system of deluded politicians’ imagination. But I wouldn’t hold your breath, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN
In any other walk of life, taking four-and-a-half years to fulfil a promise to deliver something in under four-and-a-half months would be an indication of abject failure and incompetence.
Imagine you ordered a leg of lamb today and the butcher said you couldn’t pick it up until mid-May. Or your boiler breaks down during the cold snap and British Gas say the earliest they can send an engineer will be in 18 weeks.
Starmer, like his Health Secretary Wes Streeting, talks a good game but turning round the NHS won’t be easy. They will come up against a burgeoning bureaucracy institutionally resistant to change.
The Prime Minister yesterday insisted he was serious when he pledged that the NHS mustn’t become a ‘national money pit’.
But that’s precisely what it is at the moment. If he’s serious about improving efficiency and value for money why did Labour bung the health service £22 billion without asking for any productivity improvements in return?
The NHS currently swallows £181 billion a year, much of it going on generous salaries for non-clinical – and in some cases, utterly unnecessary – staff.
On Saturday, the Mail revealed that the wages bill for NHS managers has soared by £1.1 billion, despite repeated failures to reach targets for everything from waiting lists and cancer treatment to ambulance response times. Waiting times at A&E are a national scandal.
Starmer and Wes Streeting talk a good game but turning round the NHS won’t be easy. They will come up against a burgeoning bureaucracy institutionally resistant to change
More than £40 million has been frittered away on pointless and divisive EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) jobs. At the same time, productivity has slumped by 11 per cent since before the pandemic.
Streeting says underperforming health trusts will be named and shamed and managers will be sacked if they fail to hit targets.
Good luck with that. The strike-happy health service unions will have other ideas. Labour has no more chance – or genuine intention – of firing failing NHS bureaucrats than deporting failed asylum seekers.
Starmer was talking tough yesterday. ‘Working people can’t be expected to subsidise the current levels of care with ever-rising taxes.’ But they already are, thanks to the debilitating tax increases announced by Rachel From Complaints in her first Budget, which came into effect this week.
He also claims that improvements must be ‘unburdened by dogma’. Yet his plans to make greater use of private hospitals to cut waiting lists will inevitably meet fierce opposition from the entrenched vested interests in the health service.
Here’s a for instance. During the Covid lockdown I had a problem with my knee and chose to have it treated privately. I wrote about it here at the time.
The consultant sent me for an MRI scan. I was able to get an appointment the next day, but not until 7.40pm. When I turned up at the diagnostic centre, the place was practically deserted, so I assumed I must be their last patient.
Far from it. The nurse operating the scanner told me I was her first of the day. ‘We’ve been sitting here twiddling our thumbs.’
When I wondered why I hadn’t been hadn’t I been offered an earlier appointment, she explained that the NHS had booked all the daytime slots at the facility but hadn’t bothered sending along any patients.
I mentioned this to my consultant, who said it was par for the course. He told me that the NHS bureaucracy was ideologically opposed to using private healthcare.
So while NHS hospitals were dealing exclusively with Covid cases, patients with other ailments were being denied treatment which was available elsewhere – even though it was bought and paid for.
Further investigation revealed that during the pandemic, the NHS bulk-purchased private hospital capacity at a cost of £400 million a month. Yet despite growing backlogs, two thirds of it was never used. If my experience is anything to go by, that’s probably an underestimate.
Certainly there is some spare capacity in the private sector, although this has rapidly been taken up by people opting to pay for treatments such as hip operations rather than suffer interminable delays on the NHS. But what’s the point if the class warriors who run the health service refuse to let anyone take advantage of it?
Look, I’m sure Starmer is well intentioned and we must hope his limited measures announced yesterday bear fruit.
But while he refuses to countenance root-and-branch reform, a clear-out of the non-clinical dead wood (starting with the EDI parasites) or an alternative, insurance-based payment method, I fear he is doomed to failure.
A 75-year-old, State-run socialist health care monolith is no solution to the problems of the 2020s and beyond, no matter how much Starmer plans to tinker.
In four-and-a-half years, he’ll probably be gone and millions will still be waiting longer than four-and-a-half months for treatment. That should be a source or shame, not an ambition.
I’ve always thought that those stories about firemen rescuing cats from trees were urban myths. Apparently not.
The London Fire Brigade spent more than £500,000 on ‘cat-related’ call outs between January and October last year. And not just stuck up trees, either. There were 716 cats freed from cars, sofas, chimneys, roofs and inside walls.
Firemen spent six hours rescuing a black cat called Flint which had got itself wedged between two walls in Brixton.
I thought black cats were supposed to be lucky. At least moggies are domestic pets and their owners are presumably taxpayers.
What I fail to understand was why Plumstead fire station scrambled two fire engines and a specialist waterborne fire tender to rescue a fox which had become stranded on a pier on the Thames at Greenwich. Turned out the fox didn’t need saving after all and ran off when the fire crews arrived.
That incident lasted 348 minutes and cost £2,483. Why? Foxes are vermin.
What’s wrong with a sniper?
