Every damned year, not just when there is a pandemic, the NHS and its supporters claim that the NHS is being ‘starved’ of funds, that there are insufficient resources to provide decent healthcare for all Britons and that it will endure a ‘winter crisis’. I’ve little doubt that the NHS is a crappy system that provides piss poor healthcare to Britons but I doubt that it is anything to do with the funds available to this bureaucratic monster.
Just look at these job adverts for NHS jobs as posted up on Old Holborn’s Twitter feed. They represent just a tiny amount of the massive and unforgivable waste and bureaucratic bloat that is not so much a bug, but a feature of the NHS.
So the next time you have some idiot whining at you about how the NHS is ‘underfunded’, show them these adverts for what are worthless non-jobs that serve no purpose other than to be a sort of welfare state within a state for members of the Middle Class Left and those who had the stupidity to choose ‘Gender Studies’ as their degree subject. It is waste like this, of funds that could be spent on patient care, that makes those of us who are opposed to how the NHS is run to want to say ‘kill the NHS’ and replace it with something better and more patient rather than staff centred. Britons should I believe have comprehensive healthcare coverage, but as we see and have seen in recent months, the NHS is not the most efficient or cost effective way to deliver it.
The worst aspect is that this culture is embedded like a diseased tick throughout the public sector. Worse, is that these non-jobs and the invariable Stalinists filling them not only suck the money and the life out of the system, they inculcate genuine unfairness, while slowing it to a crawl. The first step should actually to remove the sources of infection from the schools and even moreso, what I more correctly term, our Univershitty Halls of Knackerdemia.
It’s the complete lack of humanity in the callous decisions these bureaucraps make which infuriates me.
I.e., with no discussions or justifications, they just condemned 1000s of frail older people to death via covid by moving them out to care homes to infect all the other residents. Utterly evil inhuman bastards!
If the only way to improve healthcare (which is what we all used to assume the NHS was set up for) is to tear it down and start again, then get on with it. (There’s no point in waiting for internal reform: bureaucrats never make savings in their own fiefdoms.)
Doctors & nurses – no problem. Administrators – soulless swine who’d sell their own parents.
@Ed P
Sadly many Doctors & nurses are now bureaucratic box tickers who put patient health below their adherence to NHS. Made hugely worse by Blair imposing Nursing Degree. Like teachers, they no longer see their job as a vocation
This has been made abundantly clear over last 10 months with schools, hospitals and GP Surgeries effectively closed. Although the signs were there when Blair & Brown promoted GPs switching to ‘patient pays you’ 0845 numbers
Making nursing a degree profession has in my view been an absolute disaster. It has removed from the pool of potential nursing recruits those who felt that they had a vocation for nursing but didn’t have either the time or the money to do a degree. It has replaced good potential nurses with degree educated middle class box tickers often with an extreme absence of empathy.
I got covid in April, from a “graduate nurse” who had it. Outside from 12 feet away she coughed in my direction, didn’t cover her mouth. We’d not left the house for a couple of weeks before that but a couple of days after being exposed to her cough and we all came down sick. How can a seriously ill graduate medical practitioner NOT know to cover her mouth when she coughs? We were taught to do that as children in the 1960s.
When I told this same nurse that in my experience over last 20 years that hospitals were dirty places, with no soap in toilets, no hand gel in dispensers, she agreed and replied “it’s the staff who steal it”.
The NHS is a disgrace. I’ve lost count of the friends/relatives I’ve known who ended up dead or in ICU from trivial conditions that were allowed to become life-threatening or from life-threatening conditions which were dismissed as trivial. Four years after my sister-in-law died from “backache” – my brother is still fighting NHS bureaucracy to see his dead wife’s medical records. I spoke to her 6 months before she died and even by phone I could tell her that the levels of pain and immobility she was experiencing were not from back pain. A friend with double pneumonia and pleurisy was transferred between “world standard” NHS hospitals in a snowy Winter – he was left in a wheelchair in his pyjamas waiting outside for an ambulance for a hour with snow settling on him and his wheelchair! He ended up in hospital for 4 weeks, and 20 years later he still gets chest pain (the staff had been skipping his antibiotics, so what was pneumonia spread and worsened). Not to mention the friend who died from cancer that had been diagnosed as haemorrhoids – the real condition was only diagnosed when he went for surgery for haemorrhoids i.e. he’d been seen by multiple doctors over a period of months who had all falied to see the true condition.
There is no cost to failure. People only tolerate this worse-than-Third-World service because they are conned into believing “it’s free”. As James Burnham (a former chum of Trotsky) pointed out in the early 1960s – the rise of Leftism is the lie that a society tells itself to distract the public from the society’s continued collapse.