Nhs

Almost two years ago, a cancer surgeon named Joseph Meirion Thomas decided that he could no longer keep quiet about what he regarded as a major abuse of the NHS. The Francis inquiry into the scandal at Stafford Hospital had just published its report, reminding doctors of their ‘duty of candour’. Thomas interpreted that to mean that health professionals ‘should feel supported and protected should they ever need to speak out.’ In that spirit, he wrote in The Spectator about ‘health tourism’ — foreign nationals using NHS services to which they are not entitled, placing an already overburdened system under yet more strain. His article caught the attention of Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, who ordered a full investigation.

The Christmas/New Year period is always fun for health balls. Because we like drinking lots of wine and eating lots of chocolate around this time of year, newspapers like to pick up on weird little studies which purport to show that those things are good for us, while leaving out inconvenient details, stuff like ‘the study was on some tissue samples in a petri dish' or ‘the study was on a chemical which exists in wine in trace amounts but we’re pretending it’s about wine in general’ or ‘obviously chocolate isn’t good for you, for God’s sake’. So here are some hints and tips to avoid being taken for a mug.

When it comes to rows about the NHS, these days it doesn’t rain, it pours. In fact, fights between the parties about who cares more/privatised the most are turning into a weather bomb, such is their frequency. Today Nick Clegg turned up to Prime Minister’s Questions determined to highlight Labour hypocrisy on the health service, and he managed to shoehorn it in to an answer to Harriet Harman’s question about people trusting the Lib Dems (or not). The Lib Dem leader said: ‘In fact, the Shadow Health Secretary, sitting there demurely, is the only man in England who has ever privatised an NHS hospital, and they dare to lecture us. Hinchingbrooke hospital - the only NHS hospital to be privatised, and by the Labour party.

Two politicians unashamedly and eternally at one another’s throats are Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham, scrapping over who cares more about ‘Our NHS’. Today Hunt has written to Burnham complaining about a story in the Sunday People this weekend that 1,800 nurses have left the NHS in two months. Hunt is accusing Burnham of dodgy figures, writing: ‘As you will know as a former Secretary of State for Health, nursing numbers are subject to seasonal variation, which means there is always a temporary dip in the summer months - including when you were in office.

Home The government spent days announcing how the Autumn Statement would allocate funds. ‘Frontline’ parts of the National Health Service would get an extra £2 billion for the time being, £750 million of it diverted from elsewhere in the Department of Health budget. Another £1.1 billion from bankers’ fines would go to support GPs. Labour said it would give the NHS twice as much. Out of the £15 billion already set aside by the government for roads, a tunnel would be built for the A303 past Stonehenge. Of £2.3 billion (over six years) earmarked for flood prevention, only £4.3 million was set aside for the Somerset Levels, but £196 million for the Thames estuary.

After the Bristol Heart Scandal in the 1990’s, the speciality of cardiac surgery rose to the occasion, leading the way in publishing individual surgeon’s mortality figures and self-audit, which made it perhaps the most transparent speciality in the UK, and thus consolidating its long-held position as a world leader in the training of surgeons and patient safety. Professor Bruce Keogh, head of NHS England, recently announced that NHS surgeons will now be asked to submit their mortality data online to public scrutiny, and failure to do so will result in medical purgatory. The cardiac surgery experience suggests that 'league tables' will improve outcomes; I disagree. The public deserves competence from their surgeons, something prevalent in the NHS 99.9% of the time.

Health, health, health. Viewers of PMQs must be sick of it by now. Health this, health that. Health, health. On and on. Ad nauseam. Today’s exchanges involved the usual tussle over which Superman can save the NHS. Dave and his virile economy or Ed with his honked out assertions that he’s the patient’s champion? The only place where healthcare isn’t massively overstretched is west Africa. Tory Edward Garnier revealed that a spanking new hospital in Sierra Leone, completed with UK money, and run by Save the Children, is currently treating just five patients. So that’s how you hit waiting time targets. Run the place so badly that everyone runs in the opposite direction. Cameron promised to chivvy this somnolent facility into life.

Mark Reckless is in trouble for reckless campaigning. One of his promotional leaflets (pdf), noting his plans for the NHS in Rochester and Strood, features a photo of Reckless alongside the Medway NHS Trust chief executive Phillip Barnes. Unsurprisingly, the local NHS chiefs aren't happy about this. By using a photo of Barnes and Reckless, taken when he was the Conservative MP for Rochester, on a campaign leaflet the Medway NHS trust believes it may be taken as 'inferring that both Dr Barnes and the hospital were supporting Mr Reckless' campaign.

I am leaving London soon, coming to the end of my time as a voluntary hospital visitor working from a chaplaincy in a London teaching hospital. I have been roaming around a variety of wards for the last three years, only one day a week, but in those few hours I have seen quite a lot. The most disturbing things have been the poor quality food, which cannot aid anyone’s recovery, and the neglect of the very old and vulnerable, the patients rather ominously labelled ‘bed blockers’. On my last visit, the Anglican chaplain was not in the hospital, so instead of attending a morning service with him in the hospital chapel, I went up onto the wards early, at breakfast time. In one ward there is a neighbour of mine, an old man I’ve known for years.