The NHS is important, providing treatment, relief and care in time of need, but no-one can claim it is responsible for more than 50% at the maximum of increased life expectancy in the UK.
So it follows that many other things need to be addressed too, to improve health and well-being especially of those with the worst health chances. All the old public health targets as well as a few more – poverty, unemployment, poor nutrition, dangerous work, over-work, bad housing, air pollution, poor education, fear for today and fear for the future, insecurity, helplessness, hopelessness. and lack of access to knowledge about health and lack of access to health promoting experiences like fresh air, exercise, affordable healthy food. The politicians all know most of this already, don’t they ? And so does almost everybody else. They know what they want their children to have or to avoid as they grow up.
Its not rocket science, its much more important than that, its restoring human understanding of what makes a good life and aiming towards a society where all can have one, instead of asking what (profitable) tests and medicines everyone should have to be ‘healthy”
An alternative guide to the new NHS in England:
An alternative guide to the new NHS in England from The King's Fund on Vimeo.
NB this was produced in 2013. It doesn’t quite work like this any more.
Also on this site:
Complaints, regulation and enquries, NHS reorganisation, Socialist Medical Association and the Foundation of the NHS
What do people think of the NHS?
- How does the English NHS compare with other systems?
- Opinions about the NHS: GP patient surveys;
- Care Quality Commission patient surveys
- Patient Opinion: an independent site about experiences of UK health services, good or bad.
- The Patients Association
Studies of the NHS
- 10 Year Health Check: Labour and the NHS
- 24 Hours to Save the NHS
- Audit Commission health studies
- CMO challenges waste and inequity in Health Service provision 2006
- Does poor health justify NHS reform? John Appleby 2011
- Dr Foster – the leading provider of healthcare information and benchmarking solutions in England
- Health Policy Insight
- Health reforms will cut quality rather than boost productivity
- Health Service Journal – behind a paywall
- Health Statistics
- Health Unlocked
- I want great care
- Just Managing in Health
- Local variations in NHS spending priorities Kings Fund 2008
- Maps showing patient diagnoses, therapies and wellbeing. Geographic maps make it easy to visualise immediately the regions where most healthcare is conducted, where the population is under stress due to illness, and where the healthcare system is performing well by meeting patient needs.
- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally, 2010 Update
- More hospitals need to close, says ex-NHS boss 2011
- National Audit Office studies of health and social care
- New research demonstrates constant productivity growth in the NHS 2012
- NHS at 60 – the cost of health BBC
- NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare
- NHS Choices
- NHS in 2008
- NHS reform: Ten Things to Argue About 2012
- NHS stories (The Guardian)
- NHS Staff experience
- Performance Evaluation and The NHS: A Case Study In Conceptual Perplexity and Organizational Complexity Rudolf Klein 1982
- Public Accounts Committee
- Quality Indicators
- Radical Statistics Group
- Sally Irvine lecture The NHS – past, present and future Ken Jarrold 2005
- Spending on Health Care How much is enough? Kings Fund 2006
- Waiting Times Targets– NHS Gooroo
- The War on Waiting for Hospital Treatment: What has Labour achieved and what challenges remain? Kings Fund 2005
- Where’s the money going? Kings Fund Briefing 2006
- Why we need fewer hospital beds NHS Confederation 2006
I think that one of main problems we have in the NHS today is that the rapid expansion of funding between 2000 and 2010 drew in large numbers of staff, especially nurses, who wouldn’t have returned to work in the past. Staff costs 70%, disposables and drugs, 20% and buildings 10%. There’s little to be done about buildings now that most are mortgaged and a £ of savings on procurement prices is effective only 20p. We have more people working in the NHS than in the entire German healthcare system and they have 20m more people. This can only mean that a lot of our staff are not needed and are not adding value, whilst clearing out the non-jobs would save 70p on the £.
The second biggest scourge is targets. They all need to be scrapped because many are designed to “save lives” and so are ultimately all fairs assignments.
Ironically, there is a way in which the NHS could have been much better, quicker and more effective. That would have been to steadily increase the output of medical schools from the beginning of the Thatcher internal market. We still have a significant shortage of consultants and GPs, but by now competition between doctors for jobs would have driven down costs and up standards. Instead of this we have a bloated, ineffective system with hundreds of thousands of non-bedside nurses doing non-jobs and making 20% of a decision. My department is stiff with uniformed nurses looking after a computer.