NHS. Unaffordable? I don't think so.
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!
Ten Things
There’s an old curse which goes “may you live in interesting times”. But of course that can work both ways; we always do live in interesting times, but not necessarily for the negative reasons the curse implies. Sometimes the interestingness is goodness.
As a reflection of this, and because in the last month I’ve become a state-registered geriatric, I thought we’d have an historical “ten things” this month.
So here are 10 UK Historical Events in My Lifetime:
- Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female British Prime Minister (1979)
- Death of Winston Churchill (1965)
- Accession of Elizabeth II (1952)
- Britain joins the European Economic Community (as the EU then was) (1973)
- Falklands War (1982)
- Roger Bannister runs first sub-4 minute mile (1954)
- Profumo Affair (1963)
- Great Train Robbery (1963)
- Voting age lowered to 18 (1969)
- Decimalisation of coinage (1971)
Oddity of the Week
We all know that soldiers in the British Army are not allowed to wear beards on parade. But that isn’t quite true. There is one rank who is allowed a full beard: the Pioneer Sergeant.
Pioneer Sergeants have existed since the 18th century, beginning when every British infantry company had one ‘pioneer’ who would march in front of the regiment. He would wear a stout apron, which protected his uniform whilst he was performing his duties, and carry an axe to clear the path for anyone following behind. It was also the Pioneer Sergeant’s duty to kill horses that had been wounded in battle, do running repairs and be a blacksmith. Consequently they were traditionally the biggest, strongest, “do-not-fuck-with-me” member of the company.
In modern parades, Pioneer Sergeants still wear their ceremonial aprons and carry their traditional axes in place of a bayonet.
And of course there are other, less traditional, exceptions to the “no beards” rule such a Sikhs.
More over on Forces TV.
Weekly Photograph
A couple of weeks ago I posted a photo of one of my Phalaenopsis orchids, all of which are in flower. And now, this week, one of my Dendrobiums has come into flower on the study windowsill. Not prolifically, but nice nonetheless.
Dendrobium in Winter Sun
Greenford; February 2016
Click the image for a larger view
Thinking Thursday #5 Answer
This week in Thinking Thursday I asked you to find the next number in the sequence:
Who discovered that it is 311 311 222 113?
If you did, then well done!
So how do you get there?
Well this is what’s known as a look-and-say sequence in which each term is constructed by describing the previous term.
So if we start with the number 3, the next term is “one 3” as the previous number contains just one of the number three. So now we have 3, 13.
And the third number describes the second number, hence it is “one 1, one 3” or 1113, which we wrote as 1 113 just to throw you off the scent a bit. We now have 3, 13, 1 113.
Similarly, number four is constructed from number three: “three 1s, one 3”; or 3 113, giving us the sequence 3, 13, 1 113, 3 113. And so on.
But do you notice something else about this sequence? Yes, that’s right, the last number is always 3. In fact that’s true for any look-and-say sequence which starts with an integer between 0 and 9 — the last digit of each term will always be the starting number.
What I didn’t know was that the look-and-say sequence was introduced and analysed by the British mathematician John Conway who is still alive, and who also invented the Game of Life.
Good fun!
Get a Life
We all know the Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, is on the warpath against alcohol. And she is on record as saying to Parliamentary Committee this week:
I would like people to make their choice knowing the issues and do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine and think, “Do I want my glass of wine or do I want to raise my risk of breast cancer?” And I take a decision each time I have a glass.
Christopher Snowdon calls it well in the Spectator on Wednesday:
She insists that she weighs up this trade-off every time she takes a drink. Just think about that. This is how she lives her life …
There is a distinction between understanding risk and being so preoccupied with death that you can’t pour a glass of wine without thinking about tumours. Cross that line and you enter a dark realm inhabited by neuroticism, unhappiness and the Chief Medical Officer …
… whatever she throws at us in the years ahead, always remember that if you are able to crack open a bottle of booze without dwelling on thoughts of cancer, you have already beaten her at the game of life.
If she was as intellectually acute as she would like to have us believe she would know that the change in risk of breast cancer before age 75 is around 9.5%, rising to perhaps 10.6% with the consumption of alcohol. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this is about a 10% risk regardless. And while technically it may be statistically significant (though it doesn’t look it from here) it’s unlikely to be emotionally significant to the vast majority. After all there is something called “quality of life” — something the CMO seems not to have.
Former Tory minister Lord Tebbit has also waded in (Daily Mail; 21 January):
[He] ridiculed her latest ‘drink tea instead of wine’ edict, saying: ‘The Chief Medical Officer regards a quiet glass of sherry as too risky to contemplate. Poor creature. She must shudder in her shoes at the risks taken every Sunday morning by celebrants at Holy Communion sipping at the Communion wine. As I look forward to my 85th birthday in the spring, and my brother’s 89th in the autumn, she is unlikely to persuade me to desist from my nightly half-bottle, or he from his.’
Quite so. This very well connected and wealthy female appears to think we’re as stupid as she is a miserable control freak.
Besides, remember: Research causes cancer in rats.
Something for the Weekend
Thinking Thursday #5
We haven’t had a “Thinking Thursday” post since before Christmas so it’s time for a bit more fun.
3, 13, 1 113, 3 113, 132 113, 1 113 122 113, ?
What is the next number in the sequence?
As always there’s no prize except the fun of getting it right. But if you want to show off by putting your answer in the comments, then that’s fine with me!
Answer on Sunday evening, as usual.
Oh, and of course, there’s no cheating!
Oddity of the Week: Glass Armonica
We’ve all misbehaved in restaurants or at dinner parties by running our wet fingers round wine glasses to make sounds. In fact one of the first people to write about the phenomenon was Galileo — and the trick wasn’t new then! And sets of water-tuned glasses on which you can play tunes were popularized in England by Richard Pockridge and Gluck in the early 1700s.
But did you know that there is a real musical instrument based on just this principle: the Glass Armonica (often called the Glass Harmonica).
In 1761 Benjamin Franklin was in London (representing the Pennsylvania Legislature to Parliament) and as a capable amateur musician he regularly attended concerts. One such concert was given by a guy called Deleval, who performed on a set of water tuned wineglasses patterned after Pockridge’s instrument. Franklin was enchanted and set out to invent and build “a more convenient” arrangement.
What Franklin came up with in 1762 was the glass armonica.
The armonica is composed of between 20 and 54 blown crystal (or quartz) glass bowls (37 bowls is a standard size). These are fitted into one another, but not in contact, with a horizontal rod going through their centres; the rotation of the rod is controlled by a pedal. The diameter of the bowl determines the note. Once the bowls are rotating around the rod, the player rubs the edges with wet fingers, thus producing a note — and indeed usually complex chords.
Apparently the armonica was quite a hit, especially in Germany where Franz Mesmer used it to “mesmerise” his patients and who introduced the instrument to Mozart. Indeed Mozart wrote a couple of pieces for the armonica, as did Beethoven and a number of their contemporaries.
If you want to know what the glass armonica sounds like, then here it is, with some instrumental accompaniment.
And find out more about the instrument and its history at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harmonica
http://glassarmonica.com/
http://www.thomasbloch.net/en_glassharmonica.html