The NHS is the envy of the world

A panelist on "Any Questions" or "Question Time" only has to utter the phrase "the NHS is the envy of the world" for there to be a smattering of self-satisfied applause from some of the audience, add some comment about the dedicated workers in the NHS and it makes intelligent criticism all but impossible.

Frank Dobson promised to make the NHS the envy of the world in 1997, "When the Health Secretary Frank Dobson unveiled the government's Health White Paper for England in December 1997, he called it a new beginning for the NHS. He said his aim was to promote fairness and efficiency while eliminating waste and unnecessary bureaucracy. The Paper announced a reduction in the number of NHS trusts and health authorities and a limitation on the role played by the internal market system introduced by the Conservatives in 1990. In total, Mr Dobson claimed the changes would save £1bn by cutting unnecessary red tape." Have you noticed the reduction in red tape and bureaucracy? One of the new services promised was "The NHS is to get its own information superhighway. It will be called 'NHSNet' and allow on-line booking of out-patient appointments and speed up test results. The government wants demonstration sites up and running in 1998." Remind me when that came on-line... You can read more about Frank Dobson's plans here.

In October 2007 a survey across all EU member states plus Switzerland and Norway ranks Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction. You can read more about this survey here. Here are some key points - "Its rating was dragged down by waiting lists, MRSA infection rates, access to cancer drugs and dentists as well as cancer survival rates." "The Euro Health Consumer Index, which has been compiled for the past three years by the Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish think-tank, is the only survey that compares European health care systems from a consumer point of view. It assessed 27 indicators in five categories: patients' rights and information; waiting time for treatment; outcomes measured by certain death rates; the range of services offered by health systems; and the availability of drugs. In five categories, the UK scores just 581 points out of 1,000 compared to top place Austria's average of 806. This puts Britain behind Estonia and just above Italy and Portugal." "the report concludes: "Despite substantial funding increases, the UK is still a mediocre overall performer."

Gordon Brown and his Labour apparatchiks still believe that throwing large sums of money at a problem will solve it, especially if you pay most of that money to Consultants who can use long words and produce pretty charts. However a recent study in The Lancet said survival rates in Britain were among the lowest in Europe.
"Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists. ."

"A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

"Well would you want to be ill in America" is the cry when anyone suggests that maybe some form of payment for health care might be called for. Well it appears that "Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.

But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free. True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, see note at end of this article -, but you do risk contracting MRSA, Clostridium difficile etc. Maybe that is why "Record numbers go abroad for health".
"Thousands of "health tourists" are going as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations – such is their despair over the quality of health services. The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration with NHS waiting lists are fuelling the increasing trend. More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade. Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away." What's the most popular country to go to for surgery? India. Why? "Almost all of those who had received treatment abroad said they would do the same again, with patients pointing out that some hospitals in India had screening policies for the superbug MRSA that have yet to be introduced in this country." You might have an 8 hour flight to Delhi or Bombay but once there the hospitals are actually cleaned properly every day, not as part of a special "deep clean". For more on the "deep clean" idea, you can read Dr Rant and Devils Kitchen. The point being that it isn't the building that is harbouring MRSA, it is the staff, patients and visitors who carry it. Roy Lilley, a former NHS trust chairman and the author of a book on healthcare management, told the BBC he thought the "deep cleaning" idea was "irritatingly populist". He said: "This will get a huge round of applause from the Labour Party conference floor and everyone will say 'yes, he's the man that's cleaning up the hospitals'. "But at the end of the day, the infection control systems are about handwashing; it's about clinical discipline and it's about screening people before they come in. "You can clean a hospital on Monday and on Wednesday, you'll be back where you started." ... " That was from Democratic Deficit.


For more on NHS stupidity take a look at the NHS Blog Doctor, Health Matters and Right for Scotland.


The NHS is free at the point of use. Yes it generally is but a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.