Nhs

In February, an NHS surgeon came to The Spectator’s offices to discuss a piece he felt it was time to write. He wanted to blow the whistle on health tourism. Professor J. Meirion Thomas knew he was taking a tough decision, given the hostile reaction of the doctors’ unions and civil servants to anyone who makes the slightest criticism of the NHS. But the Francis Report into the Stafford Hospital scandal had just come out, reminding GPs of their ‘statutory duty of candour’. The professor said that he would like to expose what he regarded as the systematic abuse of the NHS. His Spectator article was read at the highest levels of government.

'When this paper reported a senior surgeon's warning that health tourism could be costing the NHS "billions"', begins today's leader in the Daily Mail on the government's efforts to clamp down on treating foreign nationals. That's one (rather cheeky) way of putting it. Another way is 'When this newspaper reported a piece that appeared in The Spectator and made it a cover'. For our subscribers, it was that familiar feeling of déjà lu — when you read in the newspapers something you first saw in our pages. But the problem of NHS tourism, which Prof J Meirion Thomas exposed, is at last being addressed. Dr Thomas' original Spectator article appeared in February this year, saying Britain could not afford an International Health Service.

Sometimes the small points say a great deal.  Yesterday Steve Rotherham, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, tabled a written parliamentary question about emails I obtained from the Care Quality Commission under Freedom of Information about patient safety concerns at Basildon. Steve Rotheram: To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will carry out an internal investigation into which officials in his Department released confidential emails to the hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire. [170605] Norman Lamb: The Department understands that this parliamentary question relates to the release of emails sent or received by the then chief executive of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during the month of January 2010.

Jeremy Hunt has an unusual way of delivering a forceful speech. He pulls a worried, frowny face, and speaks in a special growly sort of voice when he wants to criticise his opponents, but doesn't shout, or indeed really raise his voice at all. Today he delivered a particularly forceful speech to the Conservative conference on why the Tories are the 'party of the NHS'. He used that phrase 'our NHS' that Andy Burnham likes to deploy as part of his emotive pitch to voters on the health service. Hunt used the same emotive pitch today, arguing that Labour placed ideology above what works for patients, and that it failed to address problems. He said: 'Even their own people felt desperately uncomfortable.

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans. I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be I don’t know: I have never seen anyone in charge of food. ‘It’s hopeless,’ he told me. ‘I’ve asked them before, they won’t do it.

Are David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt going about fixing the NHS in the wrong way? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, former No.10 advisor Sean Worth and director of Reform Andrew Haldenby discuss Dr J Meirion Thomas’s Spectator cover feature on the problems with the Health Secretary's plans to reshape the NHS. Is Dr Thomas right in saying we need more focus on training GPs, and not centralised technological solutions? Will the government's reforms be remembered in 100 years as a landmark moment for the NHS? And do we need more focus on recruiting British doctors, to improve the quality of care? Freddy Gray and the Economist’s Daniel Knowles also debate the plight of the unpaid intern and whether interns should stop moaning about how they are treated.

Jeremy Hunt’s quiet demeanour is deceptive. The Health Secretary has a bit of what my late grandfather called ‘iron in the soul’ – a measure of self-confidence, calculation and the determination not to let the bastards get you down. ‘Iron in the soul’ came in handy during the Burma campaign in the Second World War. And I imagine that it’s vital if one is to prosper as Secretary of State for Health. Hunt was sent to the Department of Health last year in order to clean up the political mess left by Andrew Lansley. Hunt’s tenure has been beset by scandals beyond his or his predecessor's control – from Mid Staffs to A&E, with numerous others in between (about which Jane Kelly wrote so vividly in the Spectator a few weeks ago).

News that one of the health service’s largest operators of the non-emergency 111 helpline is to pull out of the market will have raised very few eyebrows in the health sector. NHS Direct, which ran the telephone helpline that preceded 111, is on track to record a deficit of £26 million this financial year and, along with other providers, has attracted criticism for a host of operational and qualitative mishaps. NHS Direct’s unsustainability and 111’s myriad problems have been all too apparent. Like the service itself, the reasons for 111’s many failings are complex. What it does illustrate, however, is a more fundamental issue regarding the application of market principles to the health service.