NHS - Care, or Tax burden?

Sue Hayter talks in her letter (EADT 26/11/09) of the need for equality in assessing care needs. This is fine in principle and the NHS Continuing Healthcare programme attempts to address the problems, but the reference to supporting people with acute needs is the nub of the problem in the NHS. The general emphasis on specialist acute care provision seems at the heart of the hospital closure programme. Acute care is the most expensive care, and we seem to be failing to give sufficient priority to prevention and detection with long waits still taking place for hip operations which demobilise people. The poor quality of our cancer detection and treatment compared to Europe has recently been highlighted, and the post code lottery regarding successful treatment exposed.

Now the frontline care provided by our nurses and doctors is of the highest quality in the world so why do we go wrong? The government's solution to identifying and dealing with problems is to create a centrally controlled bureaucracy that Stalin would have been proud of! There are sixty, yes sixty, monitoring organisations checking up on the Health Service! These organisations don't talk to our doctors and nurses they receive and analyse the paperwork and talk to management. If one of these bodies produces results they don't like, then they discredit it by pointing to the results of another monitoring body...so what's the point of them all?

Our nurses and frontline staff have to fill in the forms that feed this bureaucracy. The management of our hospitals who are meant to be managing the delivery of that care are terrified of the price to be paid, (cut funding, reduction in star rating), for missing a deadline, or a target imposed by a Whitehall that lives off the paperwork and often seems to care more for ticked boxes than spending money on expensive things like life saving medicine.

What can we do about all this? Well we could scrap the Strategic Health Authority!

It is patently obvious that we don't have a 'national' health service so we need one that responds to local needs determined on the basis of medical needs of Suffolk and East Anglia, not having to match the health problems of inner London, or the urban metropolis of north west England. Local needs, locally assessed, paid for locally, provided locally with specialist care properly provided in specialist centres. Our health care does not need Whitehall control and the Whitehall taxes that pay for it?

Can you do anything about this? Do you care about unfed elderly patients? Or our children getting the very best medicine? Or do you just want the comfort of a nanny state that thinks it knows best?

If you don't care don't vote. If you do, get along to the ballot box and do something about it just as soon as you get the chance!