Sunday, April 19, 2015

Health Care Class Struggle: NHS & Hong Kong!


I have always maintained that we were distracted into talking about GPs and ignore the most important aspect of Health Care in most countries: specialist care. We are fast heading towards a new class struggle: Health Care Class Struggle: Private & Dumped Public.                                 



©2013 Am Ang Zhang
In most western and not so western countries the demand for Hospital Specialists (Consultants in England) has never been higher.

Check out the Mayo clinic.

A friend had a STENT procedure In Hong Kong (like the one Prince Philip had) for a reasonable US $ 50,000.  I worked out that his cardiology specialist is earning a humble $10 million a year.

You begin to get the picture that for a long time, NHS is extremely good value.

When there are not enough specialists to go round in any country money is used to ration care. Just look at Canada.

There is unfortunately little realisation that soon, a large number of consultants would no longer be working in NHS Hospitals.

Stent, Hips and others

They will be working for Private Hospitals that initially will be offering services to NHS patients. But because of shortage of the said consultants, those that are concerned that at 78% obstruction, their heart and life may not last the wait and they will pay for the job.

My friend thought it was a bargain at US$ 50,000.

What about your painful hips, the CCG may decide to impose a wait time to limit cost. So you too will pay for it. That is what my golfing friend did in Florida for a bargain US$90,000 as he paid a co-pay of 25%.


So there are not enough Consultants and shortage creates demand and you can name your price. Consultants do not really want to waste time in CCGs arguing about the price of Stents or Hips.

Soon with changes in the amount of private work FT Hospitals may do, what successful, skillful and sought after Consultant would want to stay within the NHS only to have his pension contribution increased and ultimate pension reduced.

Why not be 100% private and where are FT Hospitals going to find consultants for the phantom private patients.

Private hospitals will continue to provide NHS work but more to fill in their money making gaps. Very smart management indeed.

Consultants in private hospitals are generally extremely well treated, not like the way CEOs of old NHS Hospitals used to sideline them.

In Hong Kong, private Consultants work with several private hospitals and all private hospitals knew that these are the geese that lay the golden eggs. All hospitals provide excellent facilities for them including free valet parking as time is precious.

Could this be why so few consultants are objecting to the changes? I remember one such Private Hospital in Sheffield where there is no charge for parking and there was even free Cappuccino!

What about the quality of work?

Remember, in England, NHS or Private, they are the same consultants.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

NHS & The Elite: Specialist & Community Hospitals!

In Health Care, death is irreversible.

The Elite

Zebra in fact belongs to the same family as the horse (Genus Equus) but unlike the horse has never been domesticated. It is believed that the stripes in a herd is protective as many animals merge together and thus appeared larger.     

©2012 Am Ang Zhang


There is now a new plot on the horizon: Persuade people that they only need community hospitals near them to be run by Primary Care and they may not even be doctors.

 

This way the punters might be tricked into not going to Hospital A&Es but Urgent Care Centres at these locals.

 

Really.

 

Punters would not be punters if they are that stupid.

 

No matter; as we will close A&Es and even their hospitals.

 

Why?

 

It is the one big drain on NHS spending and it cannot be controlled. We can pay GPs if they do not refer but self referrals to A&E is now the norm.

 


Hard on the heels of the announcement of the devolution of NHS powers in Greater Manchester comes news of the first wave of 29 “vanguard” sites for the new care models programme, heralded last October by Simon Stevens’ Five-Year Forward View for the NHS. These frontrunner sites are meant to lead the way for better integration of health and social care.

There are three types of model: MCPs (multi-specialty community providers), concerned with moving specialist care out of hospitals and into the community; PACs (primary and acute care system), with single organisations providing hospital, GP and community services; and enhanced health in care homes, with no apparent acronym as yet, but let’s call it HICH. These models are meant to offer more joined-up care, health and rehabilitation services. Some 5 million people could benefit from the first wave of transformation.

As Stevens noted in his forward view, there is considerable consensus about what needs to change to improve care and health: “The traditional divide between primary care, community services and hospitals – largely unaltered since the birth of the NHS – is increasingly a barrier to the personalised and coordinated health services patients need.”


Roy Lilley on Tarzan (Aka Simon Stevens):
 DIY cardiothoracic bypass surgery 

on the kitchen table

The Tories have left the NHS out of the Cameron 6 priorities and are promising to make a down-payment on Tarzan's 5YFV and ring-fence the Service.

It's the same as the Coalition are doing now.  Meaning; under 1% per annum more cash, against 4% growth in demand. Do the maths... they've hobbled the NHS and more of the same will cripple it.

The rest of the political parties (who might hold the balance of power) are trying to butter my parsnips; especially the Lib-Dems. They are promising the £8bn Tarzan says he needs to make his Plan A work.

However, Plan A comes with eye watering, never achieved before, yer-avin-a-larf, 3% savings from efficiency, modernisation, moving hospitals into GP surgeries, telemedicine and self-care including helpful web-based instructions for DIY cardiothoracic bypass surgery on the kitchen table. There is no Plan B.



A reprint:

NHS Reform: Democracy is for the Elite! So is Health Care!

Is it really that difficult to grasp! Our democracy is for the ELITE. Why pretend? So is Health Care!


Most people in well paid jobs (including those at the GMC) have health insurance. GPs have traditionally been gatekeepers and asked for specialist help when needed. If we are honest about private insurance it is not about Primary Care, that most of us have quick access to; it is about Specialist Care, from IVF to Caesarian Section ( and there are no Nurse Specialists doing that yet), from Appendectomy to Colonic Cancer treatment (and Bare Foot doctors in the Mao era cannot do the latter either), from keyhole knee work for Cricketers to full hip-replacements, from Stents to Heart Transplants, from Anorexia Nervosa to Schizophrenia, from Trigeminal Neuralgia to Multifocal Glioma, from prostate cancer to kidney transplant and I could go on and on.China realised in 1986 you need well trained Specialists to do those. We do not seem to learn from the mistakes of others.

When there are not enough specialists to go round in any country money is used to ration care.


So we are going to but in a peculiar manner as the NHS used to be state run and free. Reform is needed!!! Enter GP commissioning. If it is your GP doing the rationing it is no longer the State's problem.
Some very clever people indeed are working for the government. 


Is it Conspiracy or Cockup? You decide.

But strangely they thought there is still money to be made.


That is why many GPs in the consortia have links with private providers.

It would have been very unpopular for PCTs to continue to ration health. They have been doing it one way or another and it has been a costly exercise for some PCTs. 

It has even caused unnecessary deaths.

The current concern for the NHS Reform is perhaps too focused on privatisation.

The main aim by some very clever people in government is that somehow there must be a way to limit health spending.

The first obvious way is to find someone that could do it without the blame coming back to the politicians who needs to worry about the next election or next job.

GP Commissioning was thought to be the answer as the blame would now be on the GPs.

Integration of Health Care
Integration of Health Care now carries a new meaning: integrated as long as it is all within the remit of Primary Care and not between Primary and Secondary Care. Yet there is only so much that Primary Care can do unless they started employing their own consultants and running there specialist hospitals. That is one way of saving money.

The other way is to refer to Any Qualified Provider, the new NHS speak for Private Providers. Better still if these are owned by the same organisations that own some of the GP practices. Believe me, it is already happening and it will spread.

How could this be done? Simple, NHS Foundation Hospitals will not stand a chance if they have to continue with the expensive and unprofitable conditions or expensive dialysis and Intensive Care that many private insurers will not touch. In the new world order, they will fail and be closed or be bought by private companies. We have the regulator called Monitor that will see to it.

Again it will not be the politician’s fault: just bad management.

The new structure of HSCB is perfectly geared towards failing FT Hospitals. Some will survive through high levels of private work for those from wealthy countries. There is only a limited number of specialists to go round in England and in fact in most countries.

Which means that there will be a long waiting list for NHS patients!!!

Rationing by any other name.

It really does not need a genius to work out that Foundation Hospitals if they fail will be bought up by private firms.

 

So there are not enough Consultants and shortage creates demand and you can name your price. Consultants do not really want to waste time in consortia arguing about the price of hips or knees. 

 

Privateers

A big portion of the NHS money will now be spent in the counting houses of the new Commissioning Offices. Gradually more and more of that money will be re-distributed to Privateers.

 

Those who could afford to will now get their own Health Insurance and when the Insurers refuse to cover some conditions you may have to return to the NHS. But who knows, it might just be too late then as those hospitals may no longer be there

So do you really think that hospitals are not necessary, or not necessary for the average citizen of England. Soon they will be sold and it will be costly to buy them back.

What about medical training? If these hospitals are sold, who pays?

And watch out, someone, your parent, your spouse, your child and even your MP may need a Hospital Consultant one day. 

Do we still have those: yes we do!  See here>>>>
In London alone these are specialist hospitals that are famous the world over:
The Maudsley Hospital

Then there is Papworth. Need I say more!!!
I know that when you visit them nowadays, these places seem to be full of: non locals. Or could it be that these are now the new locals, I doubt as you can sometimes see the lovely foreign plated cars parked outside them. If I am wrong, I do apologise.
The truth is that medical tourists come not for the GP services we provide, they come for the cutting edge medical procedures and in England, it is also about value for money.
So, opening up many of these rather precious hospitals for up to 49% private will mean a severe reduction in actual medical times available to NHS patients.

That is why: the pretending is over. No, at the end of the day it will not be the medical care you can get from your GP or Noctors, it will be well trained specialists with up to date complex procedures that you or one of your relatives may need!

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Simon Stevens & Vanguard: Jung & JCPenney!

  Spring & Orchids at the NYBG.                                    

New York Botanic Garden©2015 Am Ang Zhang

                                 

Hard on the heels of the announcement of the devolution of NHS powers in Greater Manchester comes news of the first wave of 29 “vanguard” sites for the new care models programme, heralded last October by Simon Stevens’ Five-Year Forward View for the NHS. These frontrunner sites are meant to lead the way for better integration of health and social care.

There are three types of model: MCPs (multi-specialty community providers), concerned with moving specialist care out of hospitals and into the community; PACs (primary and acute care system), with single organisations providing hospital, GP and community services; and enhanced health in care homes, with no apparent acronym as yet, but let’s call it HICH. These models are meant to offer more joined-up care, health and rehabilitation services. Some 5 million people could benefit from the first wave of transformation.

As Stevens noted in his forward view, there is considerable consensus about what needs to change to improve care and health: “The traditional divide between primary care, community services and hospitals – largely unaltered since the birth of the NHS – is increasingly a barrier to the personalised and coordinated health services patients need.”


Roy Lilley on Tarzan (Aka Simon Stevens):
 DIY cardiothoracic bypass surgery 

on the kitchen table

The Tories have left the NHS out of the Cameron 6 priorities and are promising to make a down-payment on Tarzan's 5YFV and ring-fence the Service.

It's the same as the Coalition are doing now.  Meaning; under 1% per annum more cash, against 4% growth in demand. Do the maths... they've hobbled the NHS and more of the same will cripple it.

The rest of the political parties (who might hold the balance of power) are trying to butter my parsnips; especially the Lib-Dems. They are promising the £8bn Tarzan says he needs to make his Plan A work.

However, Plan A comes with eye watering, never achieved before, yer-avin-a-larf, 3% savings from efficiency, modernisation, moving hospitals into GP surgeries, telemedicine and self-care including helpful web-based instructions for DIY cardiothoracic bypass surgery on the kitchen table. There is no Plan B.


Cockroach Catcher:
Unfortunately Vanguard is being promoted as the future delivery of health care in England as being integrated.

Yet some of us realises that sometimes someone dear in our family may need a good deal more than could be delivered by non specialist based community hospitals.

By then the specialist that were once the pride of Medicine across the world will no longer be working for NHS hospitals that I was proudly associated with.

Has NHS England gone too far in trying to cut the cost of hospital care and in so doing destroyed the old NHS!

We need true integration and not just excluding most of FT hospitals to treat paying private patients from rich countries!

Lets check this out:

Big dreams, arrogance, infighting, and delusion all collided in the disastrous attempt to fix venerable retail giant J.C. Penney. The inside story of a revolution derailed.
Originally published in Fortune, March 2014. 
When you find a saviour, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron Johnson, the man in charge of Apple’s wildly profitable retail stores and a Steve Jobs acolyte whose golden halo also included past triumphs as an executive at Target. The news sparked euphoria, but conspicuously absent from the media coverage was any mention of how Johnson planned to save this faltering retailer in a fading industry. That’s because there were no plans. His mandate could be reduced to a single word: change. What that entailed could be figured out later.

Simon Stevens' switch to NHS 'is like Arsenal signing Mesut Özil'

The man who helped orchestrate New Labour's massive NHS investment is seen by many as the right choice for the job

The unveiling two days ago of Simon Stevens as the new chief executive of NHS England prompted widespread relief, a broad consensus that he is the right choice and, in some quarters, an almost desperate desire for him to succeed in what is one of the toughest jobs in public life.
Partly, of course, that is due to the man himself. He may have worked in the United States for the last nine years for the private health firm UnitedHealth, but the 47-year-old is respected and remembered both at Westminster and inside the NHS for helping to orchestrate New Labour's huge investment in the service in the early part of the last decade, which rescued it after years of neglect and decline.
But wait: The Independent

  

UHC’s phenomenal rise – it is now ranked no 17 in the Fortune 500 list - has not come without controversy. During the 10 years Mr Stevens was a senior executive, the firm was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed by the American Medical Association after it claimed UHC used faulty claims data to underpay doctors and overcharge patients. 

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said patients had been victims of “consumer fraud” for a decade in a settlement that saw UHC agree to pay $350m in compensation to the claimants. Investigators had found that insurers using the Ingenix database, a UHC subsidiary, underpaid up to 28 per cent for claims based on inaccurate or insufficient information in the system. As part of the 2009 settlement, UHC also contributed $50m to help fund a new database that would replace the old one ending a “clear conflict of interest” according to Mr Cuomo.

An updated version of Ingenix is again causing controversy today. OptumInsight, another UHC-owned data firm, which uses algorithms to find efficiencies from calculating the most expensive patients, or doctors with the fewest number of patients, has been blamed by analysts for UHC dropping thousands of doctors caring for elderly Medicare patients this month. The company claimed it wants to provide “a network of physicians who we can collaborate with to help enhance health plan quality, improve health care outcomes, and curb the growth in health care costs”.

......UHC was also under investigation by the SEC in 2006 when then chief executive William McGuire was ordered to pay back $468m as part of a partial settlement over stock options backdating. The scandal, which led to Mr McGuire’s resignation, cost the firm almost $1bn.

....Although NHS England said Mr Stevens will “divest himself of any UnitedHealth Group shares before taking up his new NHS post in April, and will comply with all public service rules related to these matters,” a review of this agreement by NHS England chairman Sir Malcolm Grant will be made after Mr Stevens’s first year. Critics argue that this could pave the way for greater collaboration between the NHS and United HealthCare, which already runs some GP services in the UK.

Johnson demonstrated that he’d learned a thing or two about stagecraft from his legendary former boss at Apple. He had commandeered a large basement studio at Penney’s Plano, Texas, headquarters and had workers construct two rooms. (Johnson wanted to go further and install floating stages in the company cafeteria, but the fire marshal nixed the plan.) After he had made his presentation, the new CEO brought the directors downstairs to deliver the coup de grâce in the form of a sound and light show. In the first room was the taped commotion of shouting voices and visual noise: a profusion of signage, coupons, offers, and clutter. This was the off-putting cacophony of J.C. Penney at that moment. Johnson then ushered the directors into the next room, which was white, tastefully austere, and had a celestial serenity: the new JCP.


Finally Johnson led the board members into the cafeteria, where 5,000 employees, who had been waiting on their feet for hours, greeted the group with a raucous ovation. Then it was party time. Officially the fete was intended to bid farewell to Johnson’s predecessor, Myron “Mike” Ullman III, but it felt more like an ecstatic celebration of the company’s rebirth. With nary a whisper of opposition, the 109-year-old retailer had decided to abandon not only its strategy of many decades but arguably its fundamental way of doing business.
So the NHS of 60 plus years has now a genius from UnitedHealth, sorry Labour that will dismantle it and turn it into something even better than UnitedHealth that he left in Minnesota.
Just 16 months later Johnson was out. Penney was hemorrhaging cash; it lost $1 billion during his one full year as CEO. Its shares were hurtling downward. The press had turned against him. One of the two investors who installed him had fled. As fast as they had once anointed Johnson a messiah, Penney’s directors turned their backs on him.
Since his departure the company has behaved as if Johnson’s entire tenure was a coup rather than a strategy blessed by the board. The retailer has renounced his philosophy, restored Johnson’s predecessor, Ullman, as CEO, and reverted to its old ways. If we’re heading for oblivion, the board seems to be saying, let’s at least try to get there slowly. Some observers think bankruptcy is a possibility, despite improved results of late (at least compared with the previous bloodletting).
This era has seen some truly epic corporate conflagrations. There was the precipitous collapse of Lehman Brothers, which came to symbolize the greed and corruption of Wall Street, and the multidecade decline and, finally, bankruptcy of General Motors, which seemed to embody the slow death of American manufacturing. But for its stomach-churning mix of earnest ambition, arrogance, hope, and delusion – along with a series of comic and tragic miscues – it’s hard to top J.C. Penney.
“I came in because they wanted to transform,” the former CEO told me before his fall. “It wasn’t just to compete or improve.” (Johnson was interviewed for this article but declined to be quoted beyond saying, “I do not want to interfere with Penney’s attempts to succeed.”) He and his team did indeed transform Penney – from a sleepy behemoth known for serving the needs of Middle America into something quite different: an ambitious wannabe startup that fancied itself cool, with a radical pricing and merchandising model that had never been pulled off before. The outcome was doubly disastrous: Penney alienated its traditional customers without attracting new ones.
Everyone understands that the Johnson revolution ended in catastrophe. But the full story has never been told. The reality, it turns out, is even worse than many people imagine – and in a few respects, very different. What follows is the story of what actually happened at J.C. Penney, based on months of interviews with 32 current and former executives and vendors and more than 20 investors, analysts, and competitors.
It’s a saga with a swirl of overlapping forces. It stars a charismatic leader bent on radical change and features a failed attempt to Apple-ize Penney, a mission that ended up being every bit as crazy as it sounds. There’s a board of directors who sometimes seemed more concerned with what they’d be served for dessert than with the fate of the company. Then there’s the mistake that cost the company $500 million – and the fact that Penney actually began retreating from its controversial pricing strategy even before Johnson left, raising the question of whether the company can even truly be said to have tried his approach. Throw in a hedge fund titan who always knew better – except when he didn’t. The result: Billions in revenue were vaporized, and more than 20,000 people – many of whom embraced the new Penney – lost their jobs, seeming to hasten the decline of American brick-and-mortar retailing. This is a tale with very few heroes.

 Fortune reported l
So getting the best guy from Apple was a disaster for JCP, now back to being J.C. Penney.
Will NHS England revert back to just NHS? I doubt. But Simon can blame his American wife and young children if he wanted  to go back to Minnesota. After all there is Mayo Clinic there. 

The Mayo have never changed.

Would we some day read that: Big dreams, arrogance, infighting, and delusion all collided in the disastrous attempt to fix NHS England!

We learn little or nothing from our successes. 
They mainly confirm our 
mistakes, 
while our failures,
 on the other hand, are priceless experiences
 in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, 
but force us to change our views and methods. 
C.G. Jung


An Entrepreneur!         
UnitedHealth & Big Profits