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Are we really going to sit by while they destroy the NHS?

butchersapron said:
Anyone confirm if this is real?

B5TGA5hCAAAamJw.jpg
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Wow, please let it be real and not photo-shopped.
 
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Bernie Gunther said:
We're already seeing PR campaigns intended to normalise the idea of no more free health care.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28235850
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in the best tradition of any organisation where ( in the run up to christmas) things have got to be done the turkeys are waving pictures of geese ...

The labour party and the Left (in general)'s propaganda machines continually confuse the services the NHS provide and the clause 4 esque structural mismanagment of the providers in a hope that their union paymasters will be sated .

The simple fact remains if you privatised the NHS providers, let real managers ( not the institutuonalised fast track grad scheme types or failed private sector managers who move to the culture of mediocrity created by Blair-Brown) strip out the layers of unnecessary middle management introduced under Blair - Brown and superfluous legacy roles including full time Uni(s)on Shop Stewards ... but retained the commitment to free at the point of need the service would not get worse and every likelihood would get better

it;s telling that the only NHS trust Board where clinicians outnumber lay managers is Hinchingbrooke, while most other trusts even if you put the professionally qualified support services Managers working 'in role' into a third group the numbers of lay managers still outweigh them sometimes 5 to one - espcially in those trusts who have the minimum of two Health Professional directors - things you can do in production or logistics don;t work when the 'product' is a human being who is injured or unwell.
 
Awesome Wells said:
I tried complaining to my MP about these changes. Being a tory he spins it all as a good thing. It's great to have more choice. This is bullshit: if i'm ill i want the best care available. I don't want a choice. All that means is the GP is compelled, by his manager/head of CCG, to buy from the cheapest service going - or from who the CCG is connected to financially.
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DO you understand what 'Any Qualified Provider' actually means - unless the whole thing is some great controlled cabal ( which some the more swivel eyed tin foil hatters probably do think) - it means you can choose the best / closest / most convenient ... just like before Bliar got rid of fundholding in favour of 'choose and book'
 
zippyRN said:
you what ?

this is the only account i've had on Urban , and in the 9 years i've been a member of urban i've not been banned
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Yeah ok, zippy ph banned for being a racist nurse with a mad NHS grudge. No connection you say. Ok.

How come if you're so on the ball about bliar et al you basically sound like a right wing loon who can barely be bothered to type? Back your stuff up instead of having an episode. Like now.
 
nino_savatte said:
Blair was fond of his cute little soundbites."Equality of opportunity" is just a meaningless phrase, like "aspirational socialism"... whatever the fuck that is.
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Especially as Equality of opportunity is about pulling the ladder up to the height that the Tractor Production commissars have been told to set it at , rather than equity of opportunity which means the ladder gets lowered as well as pulled up ... but as we know from the 13 glorious years of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader a focus on 'education, education, education ' began with the dismantling of two schemes which encouraged innovation and development as well as providing wider access in favour of their own brand of statist authoritarian cronyism.
 
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zippyRN said:
Especially as Equality of opportunity is aobut pulling the ladder up to the height that the Tractor Production commissars have been told to set it at , rather than equity of opportunity which meeans the ladder gets lowered as well as pulled up ... but as we know fro mthe 13 glorious years of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader a focus on 'education , education,. education ' began with the dismantling of two schemes which encouraged innovation and development as well as providing wider access in favour of their own brand of statist authoritarian cronyism.
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"Equality" not "equity". Never mind about Jesus wept, every deity of coherent thought and literacy is weeping. :facepalm:

If you wish to communicate, you could as least raise the level of your typos to something approximating the level of somebody, with English as a mother tongue, who left school with a GCSE in English.
 
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zippyRN said:
in the best tradition of any organisation where ( in the run up to christmas) things have got to be done the turkeys are waving pictures of geese ...

The labour party and the Left (in general)'s propaganda machines continually confuse the services the NHS provide and the clause 4 esque structural mismanagment of the providers in a hope that their union paymasters will be sated .

The simple fact remains if you privatised the NHS providers, let real managers ( not the institutuonalised fast track grad scheme types or failed private sector managers who move to the culture of mediocrity created by Blair-Brown) strip out the layers of unnecessary middle management introduced under Blair - Brown and superfluous legacy roles including full time Uni(s)on Shop Stewards ... but retained the commitment to free at the point of need the service would not get worse and every likelihood would get better
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Indeed, a case in point being the postal service, which has been vastly improved since privatisation to the point where we now all realise how silly we were to value a service that meant letters could be collected as late as 7pm and delivered anywhere in the country by 9am at the latest the next morning for 30p.

Privatisation has taught us that what we really needed from a postal service was a service that collected the post the next morning, and delivered it by mid afternoon the next day, turning an overnight postal service into a nearly 2 day postal service.

But at least they're making a profit now eh.

Is that the sort of efficient privatisation model you had in mind?
 
free spirit said:
Indeed, a case in point being the postal service, which has been vastly improved since privatisation to the point where we now all realise how silly we were to value a service that meant letters could be collected as late as 7pm and delivered anywhere in the country by 9am at the latest the next morning for 30p.

Privatisation has taught us that what we really needed from a postal service was a service that collected the post the next morning, and delivered it by mid afternoon the next day, turning an overnight postal service into a nearly 2 day postal service.

But at least they're making a profit now eh.

Is that the sort of efficient privatisation model you had in mind?
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Last post collection times hasn't changed in any of the places i've lived in in the few years, as the changes you are referring to pre-date the privatisation - As i understand it there is no reason for the change in start times for RM staff - IIRC they didn;t recieve variable pay elements for work before 7am ( unlike the NHS where there are various incentives, despite it being a 24 hour service to minimise the number of staff working between 2000 - 0700 due to it counting for variable pay)

delivered anywhere in the country by 9am the next day ? for the past 30 years my parents had typically recieved their post any time between 9am and 2pm and it's hardly as if a large village less than 5 miles from the County town is the back of beyond is it
 
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Greebo said:
Does it matter? You're only talking about postcodes because you haven't got an adequate answer to the other points...
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I think i answered your other points - the last posting times and delivery times assertions you made are not supported by practice .
 
zippyRN said:
Last post collection times hasn't changed in any of the places i've lived in in the few years, as the changes you are referring to pre-date the privatisation - As i understand it there is no reason for the change in start times for RM staff - IIRC they didn;t recieve variable pay elements for work before 7am ( unlike the NHS where there are various incentives, despite it being a 24 hour service to minimise the number of staff working between 2000 - 0700 due to it counting for variable pay)

delivered anywhere in the country by 9am the next day ? for the past 30 years my parents had typically recieved their post any time between 9am and 2pm and it's hardly as if a large village less than 5 miles from the County town is the back of beyond is it
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They've recently changed the last post collection times to 9am in virtually all the post boxes near us.

OK maybe not the entire country had pre 9am deliveries, but most of it did. Then in the name of efficiency savings they said they were scrapping the 2nd post, but it turned out that they actually scrapped the first post. OK that was prior to privatisation, but was all done in the name of getting to privatisation, the latest changes to the post collection times have come after privatisation.

report here, 50,000 post boxes moved to earlier collection times.
 
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And the justification
Isn't this just a cost-cutting excercise typical of a newly privatised business?
Every business needs to examine its costs and Royal Mail is no different. In order to protect the long term future of postbox collections, we need to improve our efficiency and become as cost-effective as possible. Moving these low-usage boxes to a ‘collection on delivery’ footing enables us to realise these savings and maintain service to customers.
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Which is complete bullshit as some of the postboxes affected used to be rammed with post by 6pm with people dropping post off at the end of the working day, and they did it to the post box closest to our business centre, which houses maybe 40-50 different companies all posting at the end of the day.
 
Anyone seen “Sell Off”? Worth watching - sorry about the length of extracts.



This is a film about a group of doctors trying to save the NHS. ... what appears normal on the surface has in fact undergone a tsunami of structural change which now leaves the door of the NHS blown wide open to closure and privatisation... £110 billion ... a year of your money is up for grabs.

1. Internal Market, Margaret Thatcher, Conservative 1991 [2:15].

Their healthcare costs [the US system we are heading towards] are about twice as much as other developed countries and their health outcomes are markedly inferior. In fact they manage to achieve worse life expectancy and worse infant mortality than some of the Eastern European countries who are managing to turn in superior performance for an eighth or a sixth as much money ...

A fifth of the patients in America have no cover at all ...

It’s saturated, they [US insurers] can’t take any more out of the US so they have to diversify and they have to find new niche markets. ... Annual cost of the internal market: £10 billion

2. PFIs: Private Finance Initiatives. Major, Conservatives, 1992. First PFI hospital-builds: Blair, New Labour, 1997 [7:50]

Private companies are contracted to manage and complete projects and these can last for the investor for up to 30 years. It is like going to a loan shark ... money is being drained out of the system and redirected away from services to profiteers. ... And the public still don’t own the hospitals.

Most of the hospitals whose A&E services are currently under threat have neighbours who have large PFI debts.

Profits can rise to as much as an 1100% rate of return. Coventry University Hospital cost £400 million to build and has a repayment plan of £3 billion.

It’s the shutting down of cheaper to run publically owned hospitals in favour of those with PFI debts. PFI is the best example where the banks are rebuilding their balance sheets on the back of PFI hospitals and schools. The money that’s intended for services is going straight into the balance sheets of the banks and the investors. ...

... [we should] reopen all the contracts ... particularly pertinent at the moment because these contracts are subject to indexation so they’re rising with inflation at a time when budgets are falling for the NHS and they’re also part of this whole Libor interest rate scandal ...

... people having to be driven around by ambulance where their local A&E has been shut, so previously their lives would have been saved but now they’re dying in ambulances. Example: Death rates of local A&E patients doubled when Newark A&E was closed.

The government is still pursing PFI either because their friends make a lot of money out of it, or because they’re ideologically committed to this, or because they’re stupid quite frankly. I don’t believe the latter.

From 1997 to 2009 in the Blair and Brown New Labour governments, 101 out of 135 hospitals were built using PFI loans.

3. Broken Promises [13:15]

“’We will stop the top-down reorganisations and pointless structural upheavals that have so much damage in the NHS” – DAVID CAMERON, PRE-ELECTION, 2010.

“What I want to know is how to drive the NHS to be a fantastic business” DAVID CAMERON, POST-ELECTION.

4. Corporate Lawyers. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 [16:45]

This act enables private companies to hide behind the NHS logo. This act means private companies will be able to pick off the easiest procedures. ...

British Rail was run down for some years systematically before the privatisation, and in fact that is a standard privatisation strategy – it makes it easier. The expert on this is Oliver Letwin MP and he has written a nice book called ‘Privatising the World’ in 1988, and in that he sets out a number of important tactics for governments who are trying to privatise public services against the wishes of their population. And among them ... is to restrict the budget so that public service gets worse and worse and worse and then privatisation can be represented as a step up ... So it’s a deliberate policy.

The Treasury took back an unspent £2 billion of the NHS budget in 2012 and another £2 billion in 2013. Yet hospitals are being closed and sold off for lack of far smaller sums.

5. Make NHS look bad in the Media. ‘Undeclared censorship by omission’ [23:25]

... The Commonwealth fund for example – a non partisan US research organisation – found the NHS to be the best in the developed world and the US – the model to which our politicians now aspire – the worst.

... [in media stories] no distinction is made when the service failure was provided by private provider companies, for example night GP cover and the private breast implant scandal.

... Before I went away the image I had about the NHS in the media is about angels – the nurses that are selfless and work so hard and make us well ... and then I go abroad for a decade and a half delivering medical services oversees and when I come back ... it’s catastrophe after catastrophe and every initiative that is put forward somehow seems to have the effect of further privatising the system.

6. Foundation Trusts New Labour, 2003 [27:30]

... Every hospital in England now must become in independent business entity. Breaking up hospitals into Foundation Trusts is essential to achieve privatisation. ... pick them off one by one.

Any time that you see the words Hospital Trust or Hospital Trust merger you should be thinking service closures and staff cuts and reductions ...

A report written for the Department of Health proposes the sale of two-thirds of NHS land and property. Source: McKinsey QIPP 2009.

It is intrinsically related to the Mid Staffordshire problem which was desperate to get to Foundation Trust status, tried to hit all its financial targets ... it had to cut staff. ... below the minimum where safe care was possible.

7. Revolving Doors [32:47]

... not only do we have parliamentarians who’ve enacted policies going out and working and being paid by the private sector who benefit from those promises but the private sector placing a lot of their people within government ... particularly the big management consultants.

More than 200 parliamentarians have known potential interests in NHS privatisation: [lists some snouts and troughs]

8. CCGs: Clinical Commissioning Groups: Cons and Lib Dem coalition 2012. [36:00]

Many GPs have interests in private health care arrangements and will be referring their patients to those. So we’re going to have the private sector holding all that NHS money and doing the commissioning process and buying their NHS services from – guess who – the private sector who are increasingly in charge of supplying NHS services. It’s like Dracula in charge of the bloodbank.

... we’re beginning to see the opening up of user charges and user fees in areas such as cancer therapy.

... That’s going to happen faster and faster so that people who have a stroke for example will find that their care is time limited so they are no longer eligible for speech therapy or physiotherapy ...

... A lot of time we’re [doctors] taken away from the surgeries attending meetings and business meetings and budgetary meetings.

9. US Corporate Takeover [41:29]

UnitedHealth paid out a single fine of $400 million for ‘mis-selling’

Some of them have a very dodgy track record of paying millions of dollars of fines in the US for instance for bad behaviour.

... The FBI is investigating NHS private provider HCA (Health Corporation of America) after a nurse blew the whistle. Investigation showed 50% of heart operations performed by HCA in Florida were unnecessary. Patient notes had been faked to justify the carrying out of the procedures and billing for them. According to Donald Berwick, the ex-head of Medicare and Medicaid in the US, in 2011 the estimated cost of fraud in the US was between $82 billion and $272 billion dollars – upwards of 10% of the total spend. Hidden behind the NHS logo, these companies expand.

... Pre-Thatcher the administration costs of the NHS were 5%. 2010 (post-Blair) administration costs were 14%. The likely percentage by the end of all these proposed changes is over 30%.

And then we have TTIP (Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership). ... will give foreign companies the right to sue the UK government if denied the opportunity for all-comers to bid on the carve-up of the NHS.

What happens under “Choice” is that providers can pick and choose, not patients – who all want services closer to home.

10. Intimidation [47: 00]

... huge amounts of money are being spent on gagging clauses and lawyers fees to buy silence.

... Peter Brambleby: “... In a number of cases I was told in no uncertain terms that I had stepped out of line and having raised concern it was now my job to keep quiet ...

Doctor Kim Holt had warned of system failure at the hospital that was to let down Baby P. She was ignored. And did not work for four years: “The system was set up was to keep us at bay. ... you’ll be passed on to an investigator or ... a regulator and then the feedback that you get is we’re going to wait until the outcome of this investigation and then months later after a very protracted and convoluted course which is very very difficult to keep track of, the conclusion will be that there was no case to answer or that things have moved on.”

“I was told by the Press Officer of a Strategic Health Authority that I should reflect on the fate of the late Dr. David Kelly who was found dead in a ditch with his wrists slashed as an example of what happens to whistleblowers – that they come to no good, that they end up suicidal or unfortunate things happen to them. It was an overt threat.” Peter Brambleby

www.selloff.org.uk. Follow us on Twitter @Sell_Off_Film

If you want to help this film: startjoin.com/NHS_SellOff
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Profits can rise to as much as an 1100% rate of return. Coventry University Hospital cost £400 million to build and has a repayment plan of £3 billion.
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This is balls. They're comparing the capex for building it with the total PFI repayments which includes 30+ years of service charges for crappy meals and washing shit stained sheets, etc.
 
DownwardDog said:
This is balls. They're comparing the capex for building it with the total PFI repayments which includes 30+ years of service charges for crappy meals and washing shit stained sheets, etc.
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This is part of the ideologically driven 'mistruths' of the left in such matters

PFI has been painted as a huge profit making exercise for the builder / hard FM operator , but it forgets what the spend to service a traditional 'mortgage' on the buildings would be and the costs of the services included in the PFI - that would otherwise be have to paid for. and the hospitals pass to the NHS trust at thecompletion of the term - it;s effectively HP + value added services

in my experience of PFI the hard and soft FM services improved dramatically as building services couldn;t be told to not do something to 'save money' ( i.e. leave it looking a shit tip ) and soft FM were acutely aware of their performance standards.

ditto the ' thousand pounds to put up a notice board' stories ... forgetting that the variation includes various stuff forthe balance of the PFI - possibly less relevant if it;s cupbardo but if it;s frdigeor a drug cupboard linked ot monitoring / alarm systems or the big screens that seem ot have replaced bed state white boards - try getting a notice board and having it put up by general trades for much change from 100 gbp
 
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