There are some who comment on this blog and who speak elsewhere, who love the NHS, who cannot see any alternative to it and who believe that the NHS is the best model for comprehensive healthcare in the world. I disagree with that position and I have previously regaled readers of this blog as to the reasons why I hold the views that I do. To briefly sum up these views then they are down to having relatives killed by NHS incompetence and other relatives and friends either suffer from NHS misdemeanours that have impacted their health and well being or who have been at very close risk of an NHS caused adverse event. To say that I dislike the NHS is a profound understatement.
However my hostility to the NHS does not mean that I don’t believe that there should not be a comprehensive healthcare system that ensures that all British subjects, you know the ones who pay for the health service via taxation. Comprehensive healthcare is in my view a good thing but it that doesn’t mean that the NHS model is the one to follow. Personally I’d much rather see healthcare get the majority of its funds from taxation or National Insurance but with a diversity of providers of healthcare in order for healthcare to be not only more responsive to customer requirements but also to make the provision of healthcare much more efficient.
Frankly the NHS is just not that good. We can all see this now. The pandemic has exposed many of the weaknesses of the NHS model. As to why the NHS is the way it is I believe that one of the main reasons why it isn’t that good is that it is a mostly unaccountable nationalised industry where, as with other similar nationalised industries, the customer and the customer’s priorities come a very poor second to such concerns as protecting the organisation itself and protecting the staff.
A good example of how the NHS fails to properly protect its true customers, the taxpaying mugs who have to cough up to support the NHS, comes from a recent news story about the sort of medical incidents that should ‘never happen’. ‘Never happen’ events are serious ones that could cause loss of life or serious medical implications for the patients to whom these events happen.
There’s not just one or two ‘never events’ a level that might be expected bearing in mind just how many patients the NHS treats, there appear to be hundreds of them. In fact to be precise there were 400 never should happen events in the NHS in the course of just one year. The press report from Sky news is a complete horror story of surgical tools, including wire cutters and a drill bit left inside patients, a woman having her ovaries removed by mistake, hip and knee replacements being done on the wrong limb, swabs left inside vaginas and patients being connected to the wrong medical gasses. Other cases of extreme NHS failure include a breast operation done without full consent of the patient and giving patients the wrong blood type for their bodies.
The NHS is a mess of incompetence, waste and inefficiency and as we can see from the profusion of ‘never happen’ events the failures of the NHS are endangering patient’s lives at worst or at best requiring patients to have remedial treatment to put right the NHS’s cock ups. Whilst in any large organisation including and especially medical organisations there will be some mistakes, what is notable about the report into these latest NHS failures is that there are standard procedures that are available to prevent if not all but most of the mistakes that have occurred but these procedures do not seem to have been followed. NHS staff seem to have done their own thing without reference to established medical procedure which suggests to me that the NHS and indeed NHS staff are now a law unto themselves, a state within a state and one where there is no true control by the patient or those representing patients of a health service riddled with possibly lethal incompetence.
Clap for the NHS? Not bloody likely.
