Saving the NHS

Stuart Jefferey, our excellent Green Party Health Speaker, is performing at a meeting in the House of Commons called by the NHS Federation on the 24th July. These are the topics, and my suggested answers:

What are the alternatives to the current market driven solutions in the NHS?

- Instead of the current top-down directives, the NHS should model itself on any healthy organism, which is always improving itself, removing dead and dying cells, and generating new cells. In the analogy, we should be facilitating improvements from the coal face, facilitating the process of finding out what works, and applying it painlessly across the board. This means the old suggestion box, where staff that have good practices and suggestions which are taken up and shown to be effective, can be rewarded with a fraction of the savings gained.

How do we retain the core values of the NHS?

- This is an ethos thing. Ask the staff. Measure morale and job satisfaction, find what the high performers have that the others do not have, and try to apply it across the board.

What are the priorities for change?

- BRING THE BLO*DY CLEANING SERVICES BACK INTO THE BLO*DY NHS TEAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How will our future health service be funded?

- Either general taxation, with hypothecated taxes on health damaging products and processes, or

- By a version of European systems, or

- By insurance going to local HMOs, in which case we are in the barbaric American system, with the lumpenproletariat effectively without health cover.

What should Gordon Brown do for the NHS in his first 100 days?

- Ask us how we feel about 20 years of continual revolution...

- Terminate PFI with extreme prejudice.

How can the commitment and knowledge of staff be used to drive the strategic
direction of the NHS?

- see 1st para. above

Has our thinking around the NHS become blinkered?

- YES. We cannot see that we are being driven to the American Insurance/HMO system.