There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian from Neena Modi in which she attacks the myth that the NHS is unaffordable.
The NHS is not unaffordable, as anyone with half an ounce of common sense can see.
The NHS has shed-loads of money to do everything you and I would want it to. It just uses that money inappropriately and wastefully — often as a result of political intervention.
Neena Modi gives some good examples (I am assuming the figures in her article are accurate):
PFI repayments (that’s money the politicians made the NHS “borrow” from the private sector) cost around £10bn a year.
Virgin Care, who have some large NHS clinical contracts, admit to an 8% profit target. That’s another £1.6bn a year — and that’s just on the estimated £20bn of contracts awarded to the private sector in 2013-14.
The NHS is complex. We understand that; in many ways it has to be. But that doesn’t excuse another £640m being spent on management consultants.
Then the politicians introduced this thing called the “internal market” (everyone bidding against each other for a set amount of work). That is reckoned to cost somewhere between £4.5bn and £10bn a year to administer.
And how much is the NHS being told it has to save over the next few years? Did I hear £30bn? Well OK, let’s call it £22bn after the government has pledged (not yet paid!) an additional £8bn.
BINGO! Add up the savings above (let’s take the minimum figures from above) and we get … Yes, a whopping £16.7bn the NHS is spending *each year* that it should not be.
And that’s without allowing for all the wastage of medicines, dressings, supplies etc. Without any account for the multi-layers of unnecessary management. Without thousands of administrators who, whenever I visit a hospital or clinic appear to be ambling around carrying a single piece of paper. Without the countless project managers and IT specialists who can’t; so major improvement programmes fail. Without continual reorganisation and re-branding creating unnecessary jobs and work.
If we could get rid of all that — and we could, if the will was there — we could not only save the required £30bn but also pay the junior doctors a decent salary to work responsible hours.
Or even better … plough back those savings to improve the quality of the care delivered from fit for purpose buildings.
It needs a really tough businessman at the top. One who will tell the politicians to “f*** off” and let him run the show. And then restructure and rebalance the whole organisation to run on the people who genuinely have the right vision. It wouldn’t be pretty, or comfortable and it couldn’t be done overnight; but it would work. If Mussolini could get the trains to run on time…
Why is this so hard? Oh sorry, it doesn’t line anyone’s pockets with gold. That’s why!
We’re doomed. FFS!
