19 February 2007

8 Week operations - who's paying

If Blair can pull off this task of cutting operation waiting times down to 8 weeks, I will take my hat off to him. But he has missed the point. No-one, I don't think, is claiming that there haven't been improvements in the NHS over the past 10 years.

The argument is (largely but not entirely) that those improvements have come at far too high a cost and that the disproportionate rise in bureaucracy in the NHS has eaten up money that should have also been used to improve patient care. I would also add that bureaucracy is now juggling with numbers to justify reductions in patient care services.

His pledge yesterday was a perfect example. Currently the NHS has no idea how it is going to manage its overspends, nor any idea how much that overspend is going to be. That failure means no-one can possibly have a clue how that pledge to reduce waiting times can be afforded. Gordon Brown has made it plain that significant funding increases are no longer an option.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home