NHS spends £600m a year fixing botched ops by private healthcare – and Hunt praises the privateers
Jeremy Hunt: He thinks the NHS is bad because it doesn’t have marble foyers.
Why on Earth should the best healthcare system in the world seek “inspiration” from the worst?
It should not. The only reason Jeremy Hunt is making that claim is, he’s so deeply involved with private health he probably needs a paid doctor to help screw him into his underwear in the morning.
His claim that there are diminishing resources (read: funds) for the NHS makes sense only in the context of his belief that health should be a profit-making industry.
But the instant you start clawing back money in search of that profit, you start harming service users. We have evidence of this from the past four years of Tory cuts and sell-offs.
Let’s look at this “revered” Mayo clinic, with its marble foyers. Marble foyers? Clearly this organisation is charging a fortune for its services and investing the money, not in clinical care, but in cosmetic augmentations.
There’s no room in the NHS for that kind of nonsense.
And Hunt wants us to believe that these fabled marble foyers have something to do with “quality and safety”?
He needs proper medical care to bring him to his senses.
The fact is that quality and safety were built into the NHS, right up until his forerunner, Andrew Lansley, passed a law to gut the service and hand its vital organs over to the privateers – and their marble foyers.
Quality and safety are part of the NHS right now – except in areas Mr Hunt has decided to starve of funds, because he wants people to think publicly-funded health provision isn’t as good as that provided by an expensive firm of profit-making money-grubbers with marble foyers.
Oh, and it may interest you to know that Mr Hunt used his King’s Fund speech to complain about the cost of cleaning up patients who are left with infections or complications after operations – around £100,000.
But who, exactly, hands over 6,000 patients per year to the NHS for this expensive service (that’s a cost of £600 million)?
That’s right – firms of profit-making money-grubbers. So much for quality and safety.
I don’t know if they all have marble foyers, but they certainly do all have contracts provided by Mr Jeremy Hunt.
The NHS should look to the USA for inspiration in its battle to meet demand with diminishing resources, health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.
Speaking at the King’s Fund’s annual conference on Wednesday, he said the Government had not been given enough credit for its investment in the health service during difficult economic times, and challenged managers and staff to make savings by ‘thinking about quality and safety not as an optional extra’.
Mr Hunt said the NHS could learn these lessons from institutions such as the revered Mayo Clinic, which runs 20 hospitals in the USA.
He asked: ‘What does this clinic that Arab kings visit with its amazing marble foyers have that is at all relevant to us? One of the reasons it has marble foyers is they have created so much value by making quality their business strategy.
‘The way we unlock the resources we really need because of the pressures on the NHS is by thinking about quality and safety not as an optional extra but as an intrinsic business strategy.’
Source: BMA – Learn from US clinics and their ‘marble foyers’, says health secretary
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Firstly these parasite health companies with plush cosmetic buildings were built mainly for those who could afford these high brand facilites eg Arab Kings and the usual royal families and super stars …not for plebs unless they forfeit their life savings. However because these super hospitals represent the best they can also afford to pay for the best medical practioners to secure their brand and avoid negative publicity. Unfortunately the rank ‘n file uk private medical companies are under the thumb of medical insurers and their medical consultants and surgeons are usually the same as those operating on the NHS, good and bad. The backlogs, waiting and reception areas are not brilliant and the nursing staff keep getting cut back so much so even their standards are not as good as they used to be. However they want profit and no matter what gets transferred or outsourced from NHS will go the way of every outsource with quality and safety standards falling by the way side. Hopefully no medical malpractice immunity will be given to these private outsourced NHS services so if they screw up they pick up the tab not the NHS.
Highbury always used to be famous for its fabled Marble hallway, it didn’t make arsenal unbeatable, and they have now left the ground, maybe he should look at that when he talks about it.
Great article.