Click here to see more Tap here to see more Tap here to see more. Accessibility Links Skip to content.
God Bless the NHS: The Truth Behind the Current Crisis by Roger Taylor | The Times
Read the full article. Start your free trial. Want to read more? Subscribe now and get unlimited digital access on web and our smartphone and tablet apps, free for your first month.
You are currently logged out. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Dec 17, Mark rated it it was ok Shelves: If you knew nothing about the NHS and someone handed you this book to read you would believe that the NHS was some vast psychopathic entity designed to kill and maim people at vast public expense from which the people live in fear.
- Sweeter Than Honey: Call Of The Kodiak (Bear Shifters Book 1)?
- The First Law Trilogy Boxed Set: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings;
- Crystalline Glazes: Understanding the Process and Materials.
- Elysian Dreams: Where the Past Meets the Present;
- Puppet of the Fates (Strange Curses #1)!
The vested in If you knew nothing about the NHS and someone handed you this book to read you would believe that the NHS was some vast psychopathic entity designed to kill and maim people at vast public expense from which the people live in fear. The vested interest in actual question is Roger Taylor who happens to be one of the founding members of Doctor Foster, a privately run, for profit company which makes money from measuring performances of various aspects of the NHS — monitoring the competitive nature our health service in essence, for a lot of money.
Always beware of people using this term, it shows they are intelligent enough to know privatisation is bad so they alter the semantics of the debate rather than the debate itself. Roger Taylor is also a journalist, for the Guardian no less who are also the publisher of this volume which goes to show how wide-spread the pernicious interest in NHS privatisation has spread. As though private health care is some kind of panacea for institutional failings.
Privateers often cite data, probably from Doctor Foster, that shows we lag behind other nations in Europe who have an insurance based system — Taylor does it throughout the book. What he, and other critics fail to mention, is that the gap is closing after the huge investment of the Labour years, and with continued investment it would continue to close. The base level for these statistics of so called failings is only a few years previous, but if you take the chronic under-investment of the Tory governments of Thatcher and Major you see why we have traditionally done worse than our European partners, but it must be said significantly better than our American peers.
Let it not be forgotten that infant mortality chronic disease care etc is much better also in Cuba than the UK where there is no private involvement whatsoever but privateers simply never point to the Cuban model of healthcare as an example to take ideas from.
See a Problem?
As with all NHS critics the Mid-Staffs scandal features prominently in this book and is used as a stick with which to beat whole swathes of the service and even hypothesises that Mid-Staffs is the first of many scandals waiting to come out. If Roger Taylor has evidence to suggest this then he should bring it to light to the authorities instead of throwing speculation about. One area where criticism is justified of the NHS is its whistleblowing procedure, or rather the following of the whistleblowing procedure.
Private Eye have covered this extensively and uncovered some truly worrying evidence of cover ups and court silencing behaviours across the NHS. Two things are needed to address this — an altering of the culture of secrecy in all public services, not just the NHS, but specifically for the NHS to be taken out of government control and handed to an independent, public sector body free of government interference with all the relevant powers of oversight and decision making capability.
The government sets the budget but this commission, perhaps, makes the decisions. This will end the political blame culture that pervades every area of the public sector. We never look for ways to stop things happening, we look for people to sack when they finally go wrong. This is entirely reactive and unhelpful. On a similar line because so much money is spent on healthcare each new government wants to put its own stamp on the health service so you get change after change after change — no actual change is given chance to bed down to see if it works. The politics of the NHS is one of the things that may just kill the NHS — every government of the day wants to give it another heart transplant when the one it had might have been working fine, or at least getting better as time wore on.
At no stage does Taylor provide a coherent analysis of why bringing in a layer of shareholding profit makers would improve the health service. There are some interesting ideas of patient involvement in care, though the extent of this is somewhat worrying and seems to be just a way of removing liability for care, good or bad, from the would-be private institutions and onto the individual which strikes me as libertarianism gone mad. The NHS is not failing, it is improving. I accuse the author of writing a book purely to further his own private interests in making money out of the NHS and shamefully couching his argument in terms of patient care.
I accuse the Guardian of aiding and abetting this miserable little tome for similar reasons — the Guardian Trust is no stranger to investing in odd ventures against the interests of the type of people who read their paper. May 03, Sean Scully rated it really liked it. The hospital chief executive has to oversee each stallholder with their own different expertises, whereas it would be much better apparently if, like Costa, each expertise was catered for by separate specialist treatment centres.
Recent Posts
Even if you accept the profit motive as legitimate, Selfridges operates effectively much like a souk, and souks behave like souks, providing what is needed to the community in one local geographical area without having more management than salespersons and stallholders. Moreover, for Taylor's complete solution to the NHS's failings to fall into place, all patient medical and social data should be collected and centralised for the use not just of the NHS, but of all patients and social services and those interested. People may worry about privacy, says Taylor, but the usefulness far outweighs such concerns.
Then doctors will be able to see everything about a patient, but more importantly, patients will be able to take control of their own medical and social welfare. They should have access to all electronic records and then be able to use them to hook up with similar groups of patients on the internet to find out more about their illnesses and treatments. Doctors should regard patients as partners that's even a step up from "clients" , both parties setting up an agreed programme of care.
Patients would then have "responsibility" for themselves.
To be treated with respect is a basic requirement of any person consulting an expert, but if you are currently feeling unwell, or have been told that you have an elevated rheumatoid factor, and lack a medical education, you might find managing your own health a daunting prospect. The benefits to the system, Taylor thinks, would be great, with patients being able to order "additional supplies of wound dressings or colostomy bags".
The rather understated purpose of patient power, as Taylor tells it, seems to be about cost cutting, both in equipment, treatment and medical litigation bills. In addition, patients would probably make more sensible decisions about end-of-life treatment, and that would cut costs too. All of Taylor's ideas are based on improving systems in an incredibly unwieldy NHS. Actually, the question is, is anything really wrong with the NHS? It has never had a higher public approval rate, Taylor acknowledges that.