Yet more wasteful spending by one of the world’s most incompetent and inefficient healthcare services.
Whilst I recognise that social media plays a part in recruiting blood donors and getting people to put their names down for organ donation, does this work really need to be done by someone occupying a separate post paying such exorbitant salaries? Also why does a cancer hospital need this sort of post? Probably not. This is the sort of thing that could probably be done cheaper by having one of the many PR staff that parasite off of hospital trusts do these tasks as a side job.
h/t Marcher on Twitter
Yes, I fully understand the TPA type position that Public Services should be fully scrutinised for alleged waste. But the argument goes beyond that, suggesting that the privatisation of Public Services would be better value for money.
I don’t quite get this yet, as if for instance the NHS was abolished and healthcare was provided by competing private contractors and competing insurers. There would be a fair proportion of the charges funnelled into competitive marketing?
Healthcare provision does not need to be a binary choice between a state run and state funded system and the fully insurance private system. There are hybrid systems based on a mixture of funding and a mixture of service providers that seem to work a lot better than the NHS. As for marketing, that doesn’t need to take up the amount of money that it does in the USA for example where advertising for prescription medications are a normal thing. A system of the sort that I would prefer to see with the state / national insurance paying for services provided by a mixture of non state providers would probably have some marketing spend in the form of doctors or hospitals making people aware of their services but it’s unlikely that this marketing spend would be excessive. The quality of a doctor or a hospital or lack of quality of them is normally very much a word of mouth thing. A lot of us already know which hospitals are shit and which doctors would rather be on the golf course and away from patients even with the existence of the NHS.
To go back to the subject of marketing I’d reckon that most hospitals would spend less on marketing than they do on wasteful and unnecessary diversity guff.
To be fair to the middle managers (whom I usually castigate for absorbing funds meant for health care), they do have to follow unnecessary, expensive, time-wasting and complex reporting rules imposed by central government. So removing these rules would (a) save loads of money, (b) allow a big reduction in non-health care staff & (c) let the medics get on with their jobs.
Box-ticking some government edict re social media would be avoided and these pointless non-jobs (above) eliminated.
But after the appalling cancellations of operations and help for the desperately ill during covid, all NHS staff should be ashamed of their roles and should undergo retraining, so they treat patients as people again.
Yes, but we do already have a two tier health system in the UK, there is both the NHS and the private providers open to people who can afford to pay outright or more usually accessed via insurance, which comes as a perk with a lot of middle grade occupations and upwards. I.e. not everyone is dependant on the NHS, and odd we’re hearing nothing about private hospitals unable to cope with thel Covid crisis?
A lot of people scrimp and save to get private treatment because the NHS is so outrageously crap. It’s not a case of one service for the rich and another for the poor. As for the private hospitals and covid IIRC private hospitals were contracted to help but that help was not requested by the NHS as much as it should have been which appears to be another NHS failure.
Marian you are so spectacularly missing the point. As always with socialist ideas, the NHS sounds brilliant in theory but is terrible in practice. In a nutshell, pros and cons of socialsed healthcare:
Pros. Nobody, rich or poor, has to worry about the cost of healthcare.
Cons. Literally everything else.
In practice you don’t even get the pros. The service that you pay for through your taxes is so awful that if you actually want useable healthcare, rich or poor, you have no choice but to pay for it yourself. That is the point, without the NHS you have to pay for your own healthcare. With the NHS, you have to pay for your own healthcare as well as the NHS. The NHS isn’t free, you are taxed to pay for it. If you had a choice there is no way that you would pay that much for such a poor service. With the current system, if you want useable healthcare you have to pay twice. In what way is that better than paying once?
Rather amazingly the East Yorkshire BBC local news have just done a piece on the impossibility of getting an NHS dentist in our area. This story is at least ten years old, my family went private years ago due to precisely this problem. The service from our private dentist is excellent, why are we still paying for the non existent NHS service that we have no access to? Over to you Marian.