If you was in the market for a car and were visiting a car dealership and the salesperson presented you with two different vehicles to choose from, one model which had a good safety record and another which had a history of disastrous technical failures, some fatal, which would you choose? Of course you would choose the safer vehicle over the one with an appalling safety record. Now imagine again the same scenario but in a Communist run society where the customer has no choice of what vehicle to buy. Unless you have enough money to bribe someone to bring in a decent vehicle from a non-Communist country then you are stuck in a no choice situation, you have to buy the analogue of the Trabant car and not the Audi.

The above scenario from the Communist nation where the customer has little or no choice in what product to buy is basically how Britain runs its healthcare services. The public get rubbish and sometimes deadly healthcare services with little or no choice to seek out an alternative. For reasons of cost and service availability, tens of thousands of those needing emergency healthcare and expectant and birthing mothers are forced to use a healthcare system where 65% of the services provided by the NHS were described by the Care Quality Commission as ‘inadequate’.

Sky News said:

Expectant mothers and patients needing emergency care are at risk of harm because of failing NHS maternity and ambulance services, according to a damning report by the country’s healthcare regulator.

The Care Quality Commission found that 65% of maternity services are now regarded as inadequate or require improvement for safety, up from 54% last year, of these, 15% are inadequate.

And for ambulance services some 60% are inadequate or require improvement on safety, double the 30% last year.

One in 10 (10%) ambulance services are now ranked as inadequate, compared with 0% last year.

The article then went on to state that 49% of maternity services in particular were judged by the Care Quality Commission as ‘inadequate’ or ‘needed improvement’.

Personally I don’t buy some of the reasoning of some that poor maternity services are down to racism as stated in the Sky News article. Quite frankly the NHS is a bit crap for everyone. My wife and I are White and we were also treated quite shabbily by the NHS maternity and general practice services however the GP did personally apologise for their clerical error but there was no apology from the hospital for their screw ups and general rudeness and arrogance. The bottom line is that the NHS is crap because of the nature of how it is organised and run. It’s not money or lack of it that ails the NHS it’s because the NHS is what it is a nationalised industry.

NHS staff seem to believe that they deserve applause for providing the healthcare that we all pay for via the taxation system. My view is how can we applaud a healthcare system that fails so many of its patients. If the NHS was a supermarket and had only 65% customer satisfaction they would go bankrupt in no time. Maybe its time to replace the NHS with something that works and more importantly works for the customer and not, as it is at present, only for its staff.