Travel Broadens The Mind, But Doesn't Do Much For Kidney Disease...

A woman has to endure 12 hours of travel a week to get lifesaving dialysis because no nearby hospital has room for her.

But…but….but all that money Labour poured into the NHS! Where’s it all gone?

Mrs Rusack was hoping to be able to use new renal dialysis facilities at Clacton. The introduction of a unit offering dialysis treatment at Kennedy House, in Kennedy Way, was announced in 2009 and the new unit was supposed to open in spring 2010.

Complications with building work delayed the project and it is still not operational.

Oh, blame the builders?

Janice Rowe spearheaded the campaign to get the unit.

She said: “I’m appalled at the delay.

“As far as I know all the equipment is in there waiting but not being used.”

Ah. Maybe not, then.

A spokesman for NHS north east Essex said the delays were mainly due to changes in NHS policy and legislation.

He said: “We are optimistic this situation can be resolved in the near future and it is hoped we will be able to open the Clacton unit in the next 12 months.”

‘It is hoped…’ ‘In the next 12 months’. Not exactly rushing, are they?

In the comments, it turns out this isn’t even news:

janiscurtis, Holland on Sea says...

In 2002 my father had to do the same journey, leaving Clacton sometimes as early as 4am & returning late evening. He fell and broke his hip whilst in the London Hospital and contracted MRSA while staying there. This was no surprise as the conditions were less than ideal.

Someone else, at least, is asking the right questions:

allanledwith, Colchester says...

janiscurtis you email your father had to make the same journey in 2002 and here we are in 2011 and nothing has changed! Its really disgraceful all the money pumped into the NHS by Labour in 13 years and no improvement. I challenged Cllr Julie Young about the new Turner Road Walk in Centre and the palatial offices on the first floor for the bureaucrats. Cllr Young defended that as a benefit. Here we are in 2011 and people are still having to travel to London for dialysis. Its diabolical! This is how Labour wasted NHS money plush offices and big salaries leaving patients in this situation! An answer for these people Councillor Young especially after Labour's prediction how well you will do in the coming election! Justify this - no change for these patients since 2002!

Hard to disagree.

Cuts? What Cuts?

The coalition hasn't really got to grips with waste in the NHS. They've merely shifted it:

A healthcare watchdog plans to spend nearly a quarter of a million pounds on new communications staff – as hospitals prepare to shed thousands of jobs.

The Care Quality Commission, which regulates health and social care in England, is advertising for seven roles, including a digital communications content manager and technical web developer.

*sigh*

Quangoes of the week

From AOLNews:

Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo will announce the new Alcohol Improvement Programme at the National Alcohol Conference in Nottingham. It is hoped the £6 million* measures will help reduce alcohol-related harm.

They include establishing regional alcohol managers, pulling together local information, and increasing access to specialist treatments. Twenty of the most deprived primary care trusts (PCTs) in the country will share £3 million of the funding...

Another £2.7 million will be spent on regional alcohol managers and £450,000 will go to the National Support Team.

An extra £1 million will fund a new Alcohol Learning Centre.

Via The Fat Bigot, who sumarises thusly: "Perhaps £1million out of the 6 will actually go directly into something that might improve patient care, the rest will be spent generating and circulating paper. What better example do we need of the futility and wastefulness of government-led, top-down management of a service?"

* Maybe they'll fund this from the 10p tax on plastic bags that they are thinking of introducing in Wales? See previous post.

Big Government f***s up, yet again (2)

The new contracts for NHS dentists which our very own government introduced* turn out to be a fraudsters' charter.

* Or indeed imposed, depending on your point of view. I know of nothing that suggests NHS dentists were actually lobbying for such changes, above and beyond the usual "Can we have some more money, please?"

"GPs paid more for working less"

This is hardly news, is it?

Average GP Partners salaries are now £114,000 a year, as against £56,000 in 2001. Adjust that for the fact the average working week is now 36.3 hours, not 43.1, that's equivalent to a payrise of 130%.

The generic headline "Government allows taxpayer to get conned out of billions by rent-seeking monopoly for umpteenth time" would cover it.

"More people can choose to die at home"

I overlooked this fine article on a recent pronouncement by Health Secretary Alan Johnson MP (Lab, Kingston upon Hull West and Kessle).

Faced with headlines like these, a more accurate statement would be "More people will choose to take their chances at home".

Waste in the private sector

When you point out how wasteful and inefficient the State sector is, the traditional Leftie retort is "Ah yes, but there is waste and inefficiency in the private sector as well".

To which the counter-retort is "Ah yes, but the consumer doesn't pay for the waste; the consumer only pays what the goods and services are worth. Plus 17.5% VAT where appropriate. For example, 'Waterworld' may have been the most expensive film to make of all time, but the film was not that brilliant that cinemas could charge people double the normal price to see it."

In case that doesn't shut them up, or they ask "Who does pay, then?" or in the unlikely event that they say "Then the poor long-suffering shareholder must bear the cost", then is useful to look at a real life example; the Blu-Ray vs HD DVD 'war'.

Sony and Hitachi spent oodles of money in developing rival formats. If you were a shareholder in Hitachi, then you have paid an element of R&D and lost your money, and if you were a Sony shareholder, the gamble has paid off nicely*. But most sensible shareholders in Japanese electronic giants would own shares in both companies, so the only question is, do the gains (future income from licensing the Blu-Ray patents) exceed the cost of developing both formats? Almost certainly yes. So the shareholders haven't really lost out either.

So yes, superficially there is 'waste' in the private sector, but it doesn't really matter.

In any event, it pales into insignificance when you read about the NHS hospital wards crawling with vermin.

* When you think of the rival formats that Sony has developed and miserably failed to market, for example MiniDisc and ATRAC (instead of MP3) and so on, they had to get lucky sooner or later.

NHS Fuckwittery (8)

In brief ...In all, 127 [NHS] managers lost their jobs. The average pay-out each is to receive will be just under £120,000.

Look, if those jobs were superfluous, they should never have been 'created' in the first place? Is anybody going to take the rap for that? No? I thought not.

That this sort of practice is rife in Northern Ireland is hardly surprising.

"Health inequality gap widening"

Nulab are so obsessed with the fact that better-off people's life expectancy is improving faster than that of people in 'deprived areas', that they forgot to give themselves a pat on the back for improving life expectancy by an average of 2 years over the last decade (at enormous cost to the taxpayer, of course).

Oh ... which is a piss-poor result really, seeing as life expectancy increased by an average of 2.7 years every decade over the course of the twentieth century.

Public sector employment & public spending in the UK

In the context of nothing in particular, here's an overview of how things have changed between 1997 and 2007.

Total public spending, is up from 41.2% of GDP to 44.6% of GDP, per the OECD's Economic Outlook, Table 25 (having dipped as low as 37.1% in 2000). GDP seems to be about £1,400 billion, so if spending had remained a constant % of GDP, it would now be £48 bn less. Had it remained at 2000 levels, it would be £105 bn less.

According to this, employment in the public sector (in the narrowest sense) is up from 6.1 million to 7.0 million (column D); but if you chuck in all the para-statals - quangoes, state-funded charities and so on - employment in 'Public administration, health and education' (Column M) it has increased from 6.5 million to 8.3 million.

So what are all these people doing?

The number of nurses and doctors in the NHS has increased by 120,000 (from 400,000 to 520,000). Spending on the NHS in nominal terms has trebled.

The number of teachers in English schools has increased by 36,000, from just under 500,000 to about 530,000, call it 600,000 for the whole of the UK. Nominal spending on education has doubled.

The number of police officers has increased from 126,000 to 140,000.

That means that out of those 8.3 million, there are 1.26 million nurses, teachers, doctors and police officers. To be fair, they need back up staff (cleaners, receptionists, classroom assistants etc) let's be generous and double that to 2.5 million, stick on another 500,000 for DVLA, court system, armed forces, a few people to run dramatically reduced and simplified tax/welfare system, issuing passports and so on, so 3 million seems a reasonable upper figure for public sector (about 10% of all employees). Not that the State should employ teachers and medical staff of course, but AFAIAC the taxpayer should still bear the cost of basic level health and education vouchers to be used in private sector, so the cost would be much the same.

So what on earth do the other 5.3 million other people in 'Public administration, health and education' do all day long? Presumably bugger all. So let's sack the lot

Total government spending is currently about £625 billion. If you knock off £165 bn for child benefit, welfare and pensions, that's £460 bn on salaries and overheads. As a check - 8.3 million employees x average salary £25,000= £210 bn, plus 50% for public sector pension accruals plus 50% for overheads (buildings rent and maintenance and other jollies) = £420 bn, plus £40 bn wasted on PFI, EU membership and so on, seems about right.

So if you sack 5.3 million of them, that would cut public spending by 5.3/8.3 x £460 bn = £290 bn. Giving them all a flat rate Citizen's income of £60 per week would reduce the saving to £275 bn. About £50 bn of current spending is being funded by borrowing, so to balance the books we could still cut taxes by £225 bn.

So in theory you scrap VAT (£77 bn), National Insurance (£87 bn) and reduce income tax and corporation tax (£144 bn + £45 bn) to a flat 20% or so (see Table C4) without even having to worry about Laffer effects.

That's what I call a libertarian budget!

"Average NHS wait up under Labour"

Lots of fun-with-numbers on the statistics that show average waiting times in NHS are up marginally over the last ten years, from 41 days to 49.

What I like best is where Ben Bradshaw MP (Lab, Exeter) abandons all hope of doing the mental arithmetic to somehow prove that average waiting times are shorter and goes for a couple of bare-faced lies instead:

"Under the Tories is was not uncommon to wait 18 months or more for an operation. Tackling long waits leads to a short-term increase in the average wait as the backlog is cleared - this can be seen in the data."

Er ... so ten years later is a 'short-term increase', is it? Is he admitting that they haven't cleared the backlog after ten years? Are there people who have been on a waiting list since 1997?

Let's not forget that the nominal cost of the NHS has nearly trebled from £34.7 bn in 1997-98 to £94.3 bn in 2007-08 (planned - see page 7)