The comfort of mutuality

Recently I posted about my main objection to the NHS from which our hands must not be removed: that it puts money, jobs and political target-manipulation before patient care.

Today, a new nationwide survey among 100 NHS Trusts has revealed that patients are being dumped from their beds and into the night after 11 pm at the rate of 8,000 a week.

It’s been going on, an FOI request has revealed, for five years. And 70 Trusts didn’t respond to the survey: so God alone knows what they’re getting up to.

That’s the macro picture; now let me give you a micro snapshot.

A woman I’m very close to has been complaining of headaches for months. She was finally – after the obligatory “let’s monitor it for a bit” bollocks – sent for blood tests. They proved negative. So they sent her for more blood tests. Same result. And then for more. Same result. That process took three weeks….purely to save money on the number of tests done.

Next, the GP gave her amitryptiline. This is a crude anti-depressant drug from the 1950s: out of copyright and therfore dirt cheap. It can act as a muscle relaxant – and it did indeed send my chum to sleep 24/7. What it didn’t do was make any difference to the headaches.

After a four-week wait – we’re talking blinding, migraine-level headaches here – she goes next week for an MRI scan. She’s come off the Amitryptiline, and been given some strong painkillers. They have made very little difference.

I’m not saying any of this is the staff’s fault: I’m saying it is the inevitable result of a system where rationing has to be the main guiding principle….because the funding is directly from taxpayers at a national level.

Lansley’s answer to this is more money for GPs, and ‘choice’. Labour’s answer is to shout ‘hands off our NHS’. They offer these pathetic soundbites as an excuse for proper policies because they care far more about their own dumb polemics and ‘principles’ than they do for sick people.

There is no genuine compassion any more in British politics. There is only the complication, muddle and humbug of mediocre suits making a name for themselves…by listening to private medical lobbyists, the BMA, and the Unite Union.

But by so doing, they are destroying the good name of British liberal democracy.They thrill and glory in the game of Westminster snakes and ladders; but most of them are rakes and adders. They are beneath contempt. They slithered out from under various clammy stones during the last thirty years. But unless they wake up, quite a few of them will be hiding under stones before too long…if the stones will have them.

And they speak quite highly of me too – especially the disgusting Lord Mandelson.