NHS - THE NO HOPE SERVICE

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust covers the general area of Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and North Manchester.  Their contact centre for outpatients wanting to make appointments is located at Fairfield General Hospital, in Bury.  Like just about everything else these days, the contact centre depends for its smooth functioning on a computer system.  The computer system is stuffed.  It has been since last week.  They're not expecting it to be fixed until next week.  In the meantime, the poor staff in the call centre (many of whom have been drafted in from other departments) are having to advise people who phone up to call back at a later date.  If something actually needs dealing with, they write it down on a callback form - these are collected, sorted into time order, and then... hopefully in a day or two they'll be dealt with.  In the meantime, the system still seems to be generating new appointments.  Yesterday, something like a couple of dozen - maybe more - letters were sent out to people informing them of appointments today and tomorrow.  Posting them wouldn't have done any good, they never would have arrived on time, so the letters were delivered by taxi.  Because the letters were going to different areas, at least four or five different taxi drivers were employed to do this, sometimes carrying only three or four letters each.

How much is all this costing the taxpayer?  I can't imagine a privately-owned hospital, or even one run by a charity or health co-operative putting up with an IT glitch that puts a key system out of action for a fortnight.  They couldn't afford to take the loss.  Only the fact that the NHS is a nationalised industry allows the Trust (which covers 800,000 people) to put up with such a chaotic - not to mention expensive - situation.  Things like car manufacturing used to be nationalised industries until it was realised that nationalised industries were chronically inefficient and produced substandard products - so they privatised the car industry, not to mention gas, electricity etc.  Does it make any sense to you that they left healthcare in the hands of such a badly-discredited business model?  Yes, the Torys brought in a few moderate reforms, internal markets etc, but they either didn't have the guts or didn't have the imagination to go to the heart of the problem - the problem being that governments - and quangos - are no good at running things.

The NHS was set up with good intentions, but it's turned out to be a tragic mistake - it's expensive, bureaucratic and inefficient.  We need to start to move forward to a system based on private hospitals, insurance, charities and co-operatives, to get the expense down, cut waste and provide choice for the public.  It won't be easy, but it needs doing.
26.6.08 18:30
 


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