Next CEO of NHS

In the interests of balance....

I've been ranting on the Bercow thread about how people are mounting personal attacks on him.

Mocking a woman because her name sounds like a sex toy and suggesting sexual relationships with high ranking government people aren't exactly high standards of criticism, are they?

Graduate in lack of PPE from Oxford.

CEO of TalkTalk: personal and banking details of up to four million customers, not all of which were encrypted, were accessed. City A.M. described her as "naive", when asked if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: "The awful truth is that I don't know". “Marketing” ran a headline, "TalkTalk boss Dido Harding's utter ignorance is a lesson to us all". Fining the company £400,000, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham blamed a "failure to implement the most basic cyber security measures."

On the board for the Cheltenham festival: The 2020 festival went ahead at the same time as the WHO were declaring the pandemic. The left-wing rag The Times reported in early April 2020 that the festival had "helped spread the disease widely across the country". Hundreds of festival visitors said they had developed symptoms, according to the newspaper. An analysis of NHS data for Gloucestershire recorded "125 deaths, roughly double that in two nearby trusts. According to the Sunday Times, the analysis linked the Cheltenham Festival to 37 deaths "at nearby hospitals between 25 and 35 days later".

Test and Trace: again from the Times: "Test and Trace has cost the taxpayer £22bn (it is now £37bn). It has repeatedly failed to achieve targets it has been set. It was once heralded as The Thing That Would Defeat Covid, but nobody talks about it much any more."

NHS: watch this space.

...and her husband sits on the advisory board of a think tank called 1828, which calls for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system and for Public Health England to be scrapped.

Although of course I would not be so unsisterly to suggest she is influenced by her husband.

The only positive I can find in this is that she had to apply as opposed to just being handed it - but please, please don’t let her get it, this would be a disaster for the NHS given her track record and political leanings, despite the fact that she has said that if successful she would step back from politics.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if they gave her the job. I think they want the NHS to fail. Then they can sell it all off, their donors will make billions, and donate even more to the Conservative party and individual Tory MPs.

Apparently she would like to 'end the NHS reliance on foreigners. The twitter link has a screenshot of her Sunday Times piece.

twitter.com/CoppetainPU/status/1406547115556364290

It's frustrating trying to find out the figure for staff shortages in the NHS, but this from 2019:

There were around 100,000 full-time equivalent advertised vacancies in hospital and community services alone between October and December 2019. This equates to an estimated shortfall of 8.1% (around 1 in 12 posts). That said, there is no single, robust data on the level of vacancies in the NHS, with these figures based on published vacancy adverts on the main recruitment website for the NHS4.

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/the-nhs-workforce-in-numbers#2-what-is-the-overall-shortfall-in-staff-in-the-nhs

Does Harding seriously believe that we can make up the shortfall from UK only workers, I wonder? According to the ST article there are some 170,000 'foreign' workers in the NHS. Add that to the 100,000 shortfall and think about the cost of training and the length of time needed for training The cost is especially interesting given that the government seems reluctant to increase funding to the NHS...

Happy to be challenged on this...

I’m sure Dido’s xenophobia will be attractive to a certain type of Tory supporter.

Not sure where Johnson would have been when he had covid without these pesky foreigners!

In political and other circles it seems that incompetence is the only attribute needed for promotion. I saw this on several occasions working in Social Care and then of course there is Ursula Von de Leyen.

so scary.......i can only think this will finish the NHS. and that is the plan by the Tory govt

pinkquartz

so scary.......i can only think this will finish the NHS. and that is the plan by the Tory govt

Sadly, I think that is the intention and always has been. I wonder just how many times we have been lied to now.

There will be quite a few seriously experienced people who will throw their hat into the ring... I will be surprised if she gets it?

as an aside, my husband actually thought she was that depressing singer!!

They have been slowly privatising the NHS for years. My Mum has just had to pay for an operation that would have been on the NHS, it is counted as a cosmetic treatment but she has had it done because of pain my son was also ill a couple of weeks ago and his eye became infected. Pharmacist said he needed to see a GP and the medical centre said we don't do eyes anymore so gave me a number to ring which was a private practice eventually I was given the number to an NHS eye clinic who did a consultation and prescription over the phone but even they seemed a bit confused that the GP service wouldn't see him. I realise this is off subject slightly

It seems to me that the British public don’t actually care about our wonderful NHS until they need it. Then they wake up. This government is hell bent on privatisation, if they have the chance Dido Harding, despite her track record of incompetence will get the job. It will be a case of god help us all if we permit the Americans to get their hands on the service but I fear with a majority of 80 in the House of Commons our fate is already sealed. I do have some knowledge of the American health care system and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the very wealthy.

No!

May the gods save us. Old Hunt has tried to reinvent himself as the saviour of the NHS, presumably hoping we have all forgotten the devastating cuts he inflicted on it when he was Secretary of State for health, plus the small matter of his writings about how the NHS should be dismantled and replaced by private healthcare. i can't actually think of a Tory or any of their chums who I would want anywhere near this role. How about someone who actually has experience in the business and therefore a slight clue about it?

The post war Tories were against the NHS but went along with it. Thatcher wanted to privatise it but was prevented by her ministers on the grounds that the British public wouldn't stand for it. It's still in the Tory DNA to privatise it.

I regularly sign petitions against Virgin or American companies taking over GP practices. At least 3 this month.

Just looked at the "HSJ" for leading candidates for next CEO for NHS England. They have her in under the "Outside bet" category.

How sad to think that Dido Harding does not realise how poor her record is.

A poor job record is no bar to promotion if you have friends in the right places - this government is the living proof of that.

Cronyism, she's not even a qualified health professional as far as I know

Sadly Dido Harding is quite likely to get the job, going by past histories of hospitals and councils even.
Locally in the past, there have been several cases of people that have been CEOs and left because they have done an appalling job, had a lovely pay off that should be enough to live on for us normal people , for several years if not enough to retire on, but 6 months or so down the road , have popped up in a similar job, elsewhere in the country!

I remember Dido Harding, trying to explain the failure of Test and Trace to stem the rise of covid cases last September, saying "no-one could have foreseen that students would be returning to universities in September" (or words to that effect). I could not believe it!!!

Ian Birrell, writing in the "i"says -

"Dido Harding’s bid to lead the NHS is symptomatic of a grim populism. Despite her dismal track record in both private and public sectors, she might just get the job"

inews.co.uk/opinion/dido-hardings-nhs-chief-executive-test-and-trace-1062603

Hmmm! Do we really want a person who made such a hash of the track and trace system running to whole show?

effalump

Hmmm! Do we really want a person who made such a hash of the track and trace system running to whole show?

I think that the answer is a resounding NO, but, this might be a good place to put this story from last year:

Shahmir Sanni
31 March 2020

I have worked for Conservative lobby groups. I have worked for the Brexit campaign. I have drunk with the people running this country; partied with them; cried with them; dined with them; and loved them. They were a community that supported me, people who came to me for compassion and emotional support. I was the friend they called “wet” for my liberal beliefs, but “smart” for my prowess in the digital landscape.

I have been in rooms with Conservative politicians and hacks where discussions around the NHS have centred around its privatisation. Behind closed (and sometimes even open) doors, the ideas are the same and often lack much nuance. Just pick up some research papers by Tufton Street think tanks and see for yourself.

Discussion centres around a simple idea that anything funded by the state is wrong. Many of these people reiterate the same one-liners to each other so much that they are convinced that there is no other way. At private dinners, I have heard public workers depicted as enemies of progress, the civil service conveyed as pointless and many key public services that make Britain what it is referred to as a nuisance. Whether it is care workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, civil servants, it does not matter – all of their roles can be replaced by the private sector and, in the eyes of many Conservative politicians, they should be.

“The NHS doesn’t need reform, it just needs to be sold-off,” is a phrase I have heard used at these private dinners. Along with: “Publicly-funded care workers aren’t essential, if people are getting old they should have worked hard when they were younger. Why should taxes pay for their laziness?” I have heard them jest “but what about Grenfell!” at the television whenever someone who asks for more funding for the NHS is being interviewed.

bylinetimes.com/2020/03/31/behind-closed-doors-johnson-and-his-cabinet-do-not-applaud-the-nhs-they-ideologically-oppose-it/

“ The left-wing rag The Times ”. ?????????????