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Britain’s infantile debate on its disastrous National Health Service
Report: elderly patients going hungry, call bells going unanswered, people forced to defecate next to their beds, nurses forgetting to distribute water.
The British media is awash with indignation today. A new report from a watchdog group called the Care Quality Commission has made some shocking revelations about the treatment of the elderly in Britain’s state-run health system, The National Health Service (NHS).
Try these for size: a quarter of hospitals surveyed do not meet basic standards required by law; at the Royal Free Hospital in London call bells are often out of the reach of patients, and sometimes aren’t answered anyway; at the Ipswich hospital patients have to use commodes by the sides of their beds because nurses are too busy to take them to the toilet; at the Alexandra Hospital in Worcestershire elderly patients had their food left out of reach, resulting in hunger; in the same hospital doctors frequently had to make out prescriptions for water because nurses were forgetting to provide sufficient fluids; (according to the Daily Mail 816 patients died in hospital in 2009 from dehydration).
When do the people of Britain say enough is enough? Depressingly, if the past is any guide to the present and the future, the answer to that question is “never”.
Two weeks ago we at the Commentator wrote about the scene at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons which featured a “Conservative Prime Minister locked in battle with a Labour opposition leader over who could outbid the other in their commitment to the kind of state-socialist monolith that practically everyone else in the Western world derides as ludicrous.”
That’s the state of play as far as serious discussion about health policy in Britain is concerned – there is no serious discussion. A political intelligentsia dominated by the liberal-left has made it a hanging offence to look at different options. A senior minister would lose his job, instantaneously, even for raising the subject. “Privatisation” is not just a dirty word, it’s heresy.
And all you have to do is look across Europe to see that there clearly are better alternatives. France, Germany, Austria, even Sweden all give a far greater role to the private sector, with many continental countries allowing private insurance companies to compete with each other under the umbrella of a state guarantee of free access at the point of use.
The result is that survival rates for a whole range of cancers are significantly higher than in Britain, waiting lists are shorter, you’re much less likely to die of thirst, and when nature makes its call on you, you’re not simply handed a potty and told to get on with it.
Bear in mind, that not one of the formerly communist countries of central and eastern Europe chose the British system when deciding on how to rebuild their health services in the aftermath of the Soviet era. Many of those countries (even with fewer resources at their disposal) are now starting to do better in the treatment of certain cancers and heart attacks than Britain.
But if Britain insists on a Soviet-style health system, it must learn to live with Soviet-style standards of care.
In the end, the health policy debate is controversial everywhere. But in no Western country that we know of is it ring-fenced by such rigid ideological parameters as in Britain. And the results are there for all to see.
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Southern Cross is clearly run by a bunch of crooks but they have done everything legally. They have sold off the homes (their assets) and rent them back. Now that the new owners of the homes are demanding increases in rents there is a likelihood that Southern Cross will go bankrupt and 31,000 vulnerable people will have nowhere to live. (The likelihood is that the public purse will be raided, since 31,000 elderly with no place to live will be a huge political scandal.)
How did Southern Cross get into this state? By simply putting the shareholder first (well, in their case, the private equity owners) rather than the patient. You will always have that conflict with healthcare. The government's solution (and New labour, for that matter) is to regulate, but regulation always ends up getting in the way. The only proper solution is public provision, hence the NHS.
@Richard Blogger - the points you raise are legitimate, but if Southern Cross was subjected to real competition, do you not think that it's service would improve? The problem with the NHS is that we have no real competition. As with most government-run schemes, it's a stich-up between the politicians and their cosy corporatist chums.
"A political intelligentsia dominated by the liberal-left" The intelligentsia (from Russian[1][2] ?????????????, Russian pronunciation: [?nt??l?????ents?j?]; from Latin: intelligentia) is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture Not sure that the "creative labor" element in the definition fits British politicians unless it relates to creating a lot of hot air
The public are afraid - wrongly in my view - that more private provision somehow puts them at risk of being denied treatment.On the contrary, the present cash-limited NHS budget guarantees they will be.
Apart from the golden path to becoming a doctor, our children want a career in PR with foreign travel and company car, not to train as a health care worker. More of our nurses are trained abroad, a euphemism for Africa. Good luck, patients. You want to "Save the NHS", that's what you get.
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Let's have a look at what could happen here in healthcare. No, I am not going to mention the US system simply because half of US hospitals are social enterprises, and that is not what you are suggesting. Instead, have a look at social care.
In the mid-70s social care was mostly carried out by the NHS and local authorities, since then almost all social care provision has been transferred to the private sector. Interestingly, we've not seen much opposition from the Labour party from this privatisation, but that is essentially what it was. This is likely to be how the NHS will be privatised: increasingly more private provision until the public provision closes completely. A good thing? No.