If there were two words to describe how the NHS has handled the coronavirus pandemic it would be ‘Operation Clusterf**k’. The NHS couldn’t supply the government with accurate data, shut down hospitals and made them ‘covid only’ centres and by focusing primarily on covid has contributed to what is likely to be a massive rise in untreated non-covid medical conditions. The NHS also continues to waste hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds on non-job posts mostly in the areas of ‘diversity’ and ‘art’.

Now one NHS trust has found another way to waste public money. The Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust has commissioned, at what looks like vast public expense, medals that they are awarding to their staff. Now these medals are not the sort of thing that a soldier would get for going beyond what is required of them on the battlefield or which a civilian would get for some outstanding act of bravery,these medals are being given out to staff who are only really doing the jobs that we the taxpayer fund them to do. Would dustmen or bus drivers or motor mechanics get medals for turning up and doing what they get wages to do? Of course they would not. So why are handsomely remunerated NHS employees getting these fake awards for doing what we damned well pay them to do?

The Twitter user MarcherLord has highlighted this blatant case of indulgent public sector waste and published a picture of the award. As someone who once worked in the print game for a while I know expensive and high quality presentation when I see it. It’s not just the cost of minting the medals themselves it’s the presentation cases that also cost a significant amount of money. According to one company (please note that this is NOT the company that has supplied the NHS with these covid medals) that publishes prices for such things Mid Yorkshire NHS trust would be looking at a significant cost for creating such medals. Creating the medal die itself coming in at around £700 with each medal struck from the die being £6.33 based on 200 medals being ordered. Then the Trust, or rather us the taxpayer, would be on the hook for the sumptuous medal boxes with silver metallic lettering that probably go for anything from £2.50 to a fiver each based on 200 medals. At a bare minimum the Trust has shelled out at least £2250 for these baubles and that’s my very conservative calculation, but knowing how profligate the public sector and especially the NHS is with taxpayers money, the Trust probably has spent vastly more than that for these indulgent trinkets.

Have a look at the medal and the presentation package in the image below and tell me that this looks cheap. It doesn’t. It looks like a massive amount of money has been spent by the NHS on pointless baubles for NHS staff.

If this was a private business handing out these trinkets as an incentive to staff then I doubt that I or others would be making a fuss, but this is a taxpayer funded entity that is playing Lady Bountiful with our money, money that should be going into front-line healthcare. But it’s worse than just generalised waste, Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust is not exactly at the top of their healthcare game and was classified by the Care Quality Commission as ‘requires improvement’.

An inspection of the Trust in 2017 by the CQC found “found concerns with the lack of suitably qualified and skilled staff; the effectiveness of the escalation and monitoring of deteriorating patients; extra capacity beds and late night bed moves affecting the privacy and dignity of patients and the monitoring and assessment of patient’s nutritional and hydration needs.” So it’s a hospital with poor quality staff, patients whose conditions were deteriorating were not being properly monitored and patients were being moved around at all times of the day and night even though it was considered as detrimental to their needs. Oh and of course it would not be the NHS without concerns about patients not being fed and watered properly. ‘Envy of the world’? My arse it is. Follow up inspections in 2018 found that there had been some improvement but Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust still doesn’t seem like the sort of healthcare provider that I would want to entrust a loved one to.

This medal is a complete waste of money and it is an obscenity that the Trust is dishing these out to the Trust’s staff at a time when so many Britons have suffered for so long due to the adverse effects of shutdowns that have completely buggered up the economy and ruined many peoples physical and mental health. To be quite frank this medal looks like a giant ‘fuck you’ to the British people and especially the people who this Trust is supposed to be serving.

Having read enough of the CQC report about this Trust I would suggest that rather than giving out medals to the staff who are after all only doing their very well paid jobs, why not give to the patients who might be lucky enough to survive an encounter with the Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust.

It’s stories like this that make me wonder whether the United Kingdom would be better off just tearing down the NHS and starting all over again. Surely we’d all be better off if instead of the Stalinist, sclerotic, one size fits all, out of touch and wasteful mess that we have at the moment, we had a better Health Service, with the true patient choice and true patient accountability that comes from an insurance and centrally funded mixed provider system?