Tuesday, July 15, 2014

NHS & Bevan's Curse: What about Andrew?


“But what about McKinsey & Company, now that it has provoked the ghost of Nye, founder of the NHS and the swashbuckling Churchill of the left?

I envisage an outbreak of hospital-inquired infection sweeping through its 94 offices in 52 countries, a mysterious fire gutting its London HQ in Jermyn Street, its senior executives caught in compromising positions with choirboys and bankers.”

The Jobbing DoctorIt's begun.......

The ultimate corporate firm McKinsey (for whom the Foreign Secretary used to work) is now getting its management teeth into the NHS.

The curse extends to anyone that has worked at McKinsey too!

Really?

Wow! William Hague then!
Nah, no way, this is the 21st Century.

But hang on:

It took care of Daniel Hannan  & Sarah Palin.

Looks like one of their most famous sons is now in trouble:


On Wednesday, a federal grand jury in Manhattan charged Mr. Gupta, 62, with one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and five counts of securities fraud. He is accused of sharing corporate secrets about Goldman and Procter & Gamble with Raj Rajaratnam, the co-founder of the Galleon Group who was sentenced to 11 years in prison earlier this month for insider trading.

…….The government has taken aggressive action against insider trading. In the last two years, the government has charged 56 people with swapping illegal tips, including Mr. Gupta; of those, 51 have pleaded guilty or have been convicted.

With Mr. Gupta, the campaign has moved beyond financial professionals. As the head of McKinsey & Company, the prominent consulting firm, Mr. Gupta advised some of the world’s most influential people, rubbing elbows with the chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey R. Immelt, and the former President Bill Clinton.




"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"
Aneurin Bevan



What about Andrew?


Former health secretary Andrew Lansley has been removed from Government in the Coalition reshuffle, with William Hague moving into his position as leader of the House of Commons.
During his term as health secretary Lansley was responsible for the Health and Social Care Act, which abolished PCTs and replaced them with GP-led clinical commissioning groups.
In June 2012 the BMA voted for Mr Lansley to resign, and he was replaced as health secretary by Jeremy Hunt soon after and moved to be leader of the Commons.
The South Cambridgeshire MP’s new role had not been confirmed at time of publication

First published January 11, 2012.

Get in close© 2009 Am Ang Zhang
“Up close and personal” those words of my first guru still ring true when he told me that to understand my patients or their parents it was what I needed to do.

It would seem to be politically incorrect in many ways but as we need to understand our politicians, my guru may well be right.

It looks as if the genius is way on its way to achieve what Bevan has closely protected with his curse for years: Our NHS or was it his NHS.

GPs will be given a sum of money and the rest will be up to them.

Hospitals may or may not fail, but it no longer matter as 49% will be ‘doing’ private patients. For all that matter, it could become wholly private or partly private. Hospital Consultants will be happy with the better income from private patients.

But why is he doing this? This is when we get “up close and personal”!

The Observer: Andrew Lansley
The answer, or at least a large part of it, can be traced back 19 years to the summer of 1992. Lansley, then head of the Conservative Research Department (where a very young David Cameron worked under him) was playing cricket in Rochester. They had both helped John Major win a fourth consecutive general election for the Tories. Lansley went to pick up the ball, stood up again and found his balance had gone. "I tried to stabilise myself on the pitch, but I had lost my balance," he recalled in an interview with the Spectator. "I walked down to the pavilion and sat down, but it got progressively worse." He collapsed and was taken to hospital, where he was told he had an ear infection.
But his then wife, a doctor, saw no symptoms of the supposed ear infection. The couple fought the system to get a second opinion and the necessary tests. "Now it was true, and continues to be true, that if you have somebody who knows their way about, you can argue your way through the system without being dismissed by the authorities," Lansley recalled in 2006. "We badgered the GP so much that he eventually sent me off to have an MRI scan."
He was referred to a private hospital where tests were conducted using the most up-to-date equipment. "[The staff] were all chatting away merrily as the results came in, then they suddenly all went a bit quiet," Lansley remembered. At the age of 36, he'd had a stroke. In the years that followed, Lansley, now fully recovered, took up the cause of other stroke victims, highlighting how delays in their treatment caused paralysis and how the NHS compared poorly with health systems in other countries.
He had been born into an NHS family and had known the medical world from a young age. His father worked in a pathology laboratory and was chair of an institute of medical laboratory scientists. His first marriage to a doctor meant he remained steeped in medicine at home as he began his professional life. But friends and colleagues believe the real seeds of his interest, and determination to change the NHS for the better, were sown in that personal experience which could have cost him his life.
Langsley divorced his doctor wife in 2001    BMJ

Now could such a curse be working through something medical: like PIP Breast Implants.
The Lancet
The events of the past month show why this policy is so misguided. When something goes wrong in the NHS the entire organisation can be mobilised to address the problem coherently, transparently, equitably, and to the very highest of standards. In the case of PIP implants, over 95% of which were done by private providers, what have we seen? Mr Lansley has had to castigate private cosmetic clinics for failing to gather and provide high-quality data on their procedures. The best he could do was ask that they “take similar action” to the NHS; he could not require such action. Bruce Keogh went further: “we can place no reliance upon [their] figures”. Yet this is the future for the NHS. A system of health care that cannot be held accountable by government, one that has no obligation to collect or supply accurate information about what it is doing, one that fiercely resists its duty of care to patients, and one that is more concerned with cost than it is with quality. The evidence is before us: it’s time to kill this Bill.

Looks as though Bevan’s Curse has hit at the most crucial of the Langsley reform: the regulation of Private Providers. Those of us who has not got his superior intelligence can understand it. Its emotive and yet it is an aspect of health care that is at its best on the fringe of medical care, until problems arose.
Regulation does not work as we are still struggling with RBS & Lloyds.
Private companies could easily go bankrupt and set up in the same place again and again. Government run NHS will always be around.

Lets see how Bevan fare against the genius.

Out!

Out!


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