The post you are reporting:
Charlie is for once correct. As I said elsewhere:-
It is a great shame that the NHS is, in the words of Ed Milliband being ’weaponised’ to make cheap political points. As the Chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee said back then, and I quote ‘"They are exploiting the huge pressures that A&E is under for political gain. It is less about genuinely arguing about systems and the best way forward, and more about a campaign to gain votes. I resent it deeply, it is wholly wrong and damaging for the political process.’
Mike claims that under the STP there is a plan to remove 300 acute beds from hospitals in East Kent. There is not.
When I discussed the report with the Director of Strategy at the Trust last she said his claims were disingenuous to put it mildly.
The facts are that surveys in East Kent have shown that 28% of acute beds (i.e. 300 beds) are occupied by people not in need of medical treatment/intervention. Putting it bluntly many of these are the 'bed-blockers' who are only in hospital since there is not adequate care provision outside the hospital system.
In essence the plan is to invest in a local care model for these patients which will free up the acute beds to be used to care for acute patients. I would have though such plans would have Mike’s support? What’s not to like?
There is a serious debate to be had on how we cope with an ageing population, immigration running at over 300,000 a year and rising expectations of treatment. But it is not helped by hysterical shroud waving.
One only has to read for example the BMJ report on the Winter Crisis of 1999 under Labour to realise that the NHS has never been able to able to reach all peoples expectations of treatment and never will however much money we chuck at it.(On direct measures of health system efficiency, the NHS comes out in the bottom third of international league tables).
As the UK2020 Report on the Health Service shows every single developed country in the world has a universal healthcare system, with the one exception of the United States, yet looking at amenable mortality the UK has one of the highest number of avoidable deaths in Western Europe.
The Commonwealth Fund study is frequently cited as proof that the NHS is the best healthcare system in the world. But only one category in the Commonwealth Fund’s study measures health outcomes, as opposed to inputs, procedures and organisational characteristics.
In that outcome category, the NHS comes out 10th out of 11.
The discrepancy between the poor performance in terms of outcomes, and the excellent overall rating, was reflected in The Guardian’s coverage of the report when it said : “The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.”
Claiming that the NHS (the fifth largest employer on the planet!) is the best in the world (which it isn't) and that the Tories are planning to sell it off (which they aren't) will not improve matters one jot.