The NHS was set up to provide comprehensive, high quality health care for all, without regard to means or status. In one of his finest posts, Dr Rant looks at what is left after sixty yearsComprehensive coverageThe NHS provides great comprehensive coverage unless:-
- It’s a dental problem.
- It’s dementia: your needs are social and not medical you see, and be a good taxpayer and sell your house to fund your nursing home bill.
- Fertility- we’ll pay for contraception and abortion…but we don’t to create new babies.
- It’s a new cancer drug.
- You need rehab rather than curative treatments.
- You need adaptations to your house.
- You don’t want to wait.
- You have a mental health problem.
- You want a permanent and recognisable psychiatrist.
High quality serviceThe NHS provides high quality service except that:-
- It ignores foreign comparisons.
- It actively manages against its staff achieving this.
- It sets targets for quantity not quality, and refuses to admit that there is a trade off to be made here.
- The criteria for high quality are poorly defined.
- It pretends that “excellence comes as standard” which, as any fule (except Alan Johnson, Ed Balls, Darzi, Bradshaw and Donaldson) kno, is an oxymoron.
- It pretends that guideline implementation and measurement and compliance is an assurance of quality.
- It dreams that a computer (or nurse drone) could replace a thinking human being.
- It believes that rationing is merely a technical issue rather than a moral issue.
- NHS direct still exists (see below).
Full details from Dr Rant in “The NHS at sixty: it’s great, but…”
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NHS Blog Doctor]
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