It’s time for this blog’s semi-regular look at the disgraceful mess that is Britain’s National Health Service, a system so bad that no other nation has emulated it in its entirety.
First there are the criminal employees. Of course any business can have the misfortune to be afflicted by the occasional wrong ‘un, but when that business is in the business of providing healthcare for a virtual monopoly supplier, then vetting potential employees and monitoring them for misconduct is absolutely essential. I wonder what vetting if any was done on these particular NHS employees?
1. The dangerous doctor obsessed with exorcism and voyeurism.
A doctor who poisoned his partner in a series of bogus exorcism ceremonies has been jailed for 14 and a half years.
Hossam Metwally, 61, brought Kelly Wilson to the brink of death by injecting her with drugs during the sessions at their Grimsby home.
Sheffield Crown Court heard he convinced the 34-year-old she was possessed by supernatural spirits.
Metwally was found guilty of eight charges, including administering a noxious substance and a count of fraud.
He also pleaded guilty to two counts of voyeurism which involved using a hidden camera to film female patients getting changed at his private clinic.
During the eight-week trial, jurors heard Metwally, an NHS anaesthetist and chronic pain specialist, believed there were a number of entities, or jinns, “hiding” inside his partner, and that he had to remove them by reciting verses of the Koran and placing holy water and oils on her skin.
Lovely fellow – Not. I wonder how many other NHS medics with dubious religious obsessions are operating in our healthcare system?
2. The short term but massive fraud.
A GP has admitted embezzling £1.1m from a care group he was a director of.
Dr Rumi Chhapia, 45, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud by abuse of position at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court.
Chhapia, of Lennox Road South, Southsea, was a director of Portsmouth Primary Care Alliance (PPCA) when he moved money from its account to his, between 20 August to 30 September 2020.
He will be sentenced at Portsmouth Crown Court on 22 October.
Prosecutor Lucy Linington said Chhapia had repaid £233,000 but added almost £904,000 was still outstanding after the “significant” fraud.
Jo York, managing director at NHS Portsmouth Clinical Commissioning Group, said it was working with the PPCA, Hampshire Constabulary and NHS Counter Fraud Authority on the “serious matter”.
She added: “We would like to reassure patients that the Portsmouth Primary Care Alliance continues to operate as normal without disruption to the out-of-hours and home visiting services provided to the Portsmouth community.”
That’s a massive amount of fraud carried out over a very short amount of time. The article about this fraud went on to explain that the director of the practise group had gone off sick and had given Chhapia full access to the group’s accounting system. This seems to me to be a pretty naked and easily discoverable fraud for the doctor to undertake and will raise questions about whether he has been involved in other frauds as well.
Doctors moaning .
At least, as the Portsmouth NHS mouthpiece says, the above mentioned fraud will not affect out of hours and home visiting services in the area. Other ‘customers’ of the NHS have not been so lucky with general practitioners failing to see patients in person and only dealing with their patients by telephone. I’m coming across cases in my area where elderly and disabled people with significant needs have not been seen by their GP in well over a year. Whilst there was some justification for moving GP’s into roles that dealt directly with covid patient care earlier on in the pandemic, those excuses no longer apply. The UK vaccination programme has been a great success and it’s now time for GP’s to stop using covid as an excuse and to start to earn the £100k plus that we the taxpayer pay them and start seeing patients face to face.
It seems that the public is getting more and more frustrated with NHS GP’s failing to deal directly with patients and in some cases are starting to vent their frustration on doctors who are now whining about ‘abuse’.
From Tim Worstall:
The British Medical Association (BMA) says doctors are being subjected to a “wave of abuse” from patients over lack of access to face-to-face appointments.
If you’re paying one of the servants £100k a year don’t you have a right to getting a tad irate if they refuse to do any work?
Now I do not agree with or condone some of the more ‘pungent’ comments about what to do with lazy GP’s in the NHS, but I do agree with the sentiment that if we are paying enormous sums of money to GP’s to provide a service which they then refuse to provide, then frustration on the part of the public is almost inevitable.
Finally a round of up of NHS knobwittery, idleness and producer capture would not be complete without a mention of the massive waste that continues to occur in the NHS. I saw this image below on Old Holborn’s Twitter feed and yes it’s yet more waste on worthless and damaging ‘diversity and inclusion’ staff. Also a woke employee who was too extreme for the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has found employment where else but the NHS.
The NHS is a mess. It is not providing the front line medical services that Britons pay for and should expect. Even when services are provided it’s too often lacklustre and occasionally lethal due to staff incompetence. We deserve better than what we get from the NHS. There doesn’t have to be a binary choice between the Stalinist woke incompetence of the NHS and the horrific costs of the US system. Other advanced nations seem to be able to supply a comprehensive healthcare system to their citizens without excessive costs to the patient and often with better outcomes for those treated by it. If you asked me to choose whether to be treated by the NHS or by the Dutch, German or French systems them I’d choose one of those every time ahead of the NHS. We need to stop treating the NHS as an idol that we compelled to worship and start seeing it as what it is, which is a very poor and failing service that no amount of additional money would be able to improve.
**The NHS is a mess. It is not providing the front line medical services that Britons pay for and should expect.**
That is the NHS for which 40% of adult taxpayers, plus those who work exclusively in the public sector, pay nothing.
Then there is the issue of how much Britons (many of whom totally subscribe to the entitlement culture) have a right to expect of the NHS.
I am not saying that I don’t think the NHS could be vastly improved.
But most of those screaming for improvement have themselves shown no success at making improvements in any other similar (or even much smaller) public undertakings.
We pay through our taxes to support the NHS therefore we should get the service we pay for. The fact that too often we are not getting the expected service and get treated like dirt by the service provider. If the British subject pays for a service then they should get it.
We pay for a comprehensive health care system therefore we are reasonably entitled to expect a comprehensive and effective service. The problem is all too often we don’t get what we pay for.
The problem with most ideas for improvement is that they are improvements to the framework of the existing NHS which I’m afraid and its the existing framework that is the major problem in my view.
Ever been in hospital and the medics don’t know your medical history, and despite millions spent on an NHS Network, are unable to access details? Welcome to failure, UK-style!
In France, individuals are entrusted and responsible for their own medical records. Such joined-up or adult thinking is anathema in the UK, where incompetence, laziness, stupidity and ignorance pervade the bureaucracy we call the NHS. As with all bureaucracies, they exist solely for themselves, rejecting any attempts to rein in their excesses or failures. (The only solution is to tear it down and start again – it’s just impossible to improve it.)
Most of the medics think this too, but are prevented from saying so by threat of termination. Some say the NHS was set up to provide employment for the otherwise unemployable – the Peter Principle with a starting point of zero. This cancer on the health of the nation grows unchecked yearly, demanding (and receiving by frightened politicians) extra funds to increase its power, with few if any funds getting to the front line where the public imagine they’ll go.
I know a few doctors and other health workers – they’re all disgusted by this behemoth and long for reform, but sadly accept it’s unlikely soon with our hopeless ‘leaders’.
I don’t think that the NHS can be reformed, the problems and the problematic management is too deeply embedded. The only way to solve the problem is indeed to tear it down and start again. If the State can create a health service from a multitude of different providers in 1948 and from different sectors, private, municipal and charity, then surely the State can recreate this mixed system and rebuild it on the lines of what Germany, France and the Netherlands have?