Running down the NHS so it has to be privatised?

It's not an 'admission' at all. I'm surprised you didn't notice it was part and parcel of New Labour at the time.

New Labour did lots of good things when in office but they subscribed to the same monetarist free market doctrines as did the tories. Remember Mandelson being 'relaxed about the wealthy'?

And what was PPI all about?

Keynes went out of the window in the 1970s, thanks to Dennis Healy

MaizieD It is just that I never expected it of Gordon Brown, who, as is mentioned above has always been seen as a rigidly honest and ethical man.

Certainly I noticed the utterly amoral laissez faire attitudes of New Labour, but while Gordon Brown was Chancellor he did keep a strong control of the economy, but once he became PM he seemed to loose any semblance of control. We know he had always set his sights on being Prime Minister, perhaps, in his case, of being careful about what you wish for.

We'll have to agree to disagree, MOnica.

I don't think it was an ethical lapse, I think it was a conventional belief in the rationality of financial markets.

Monica ''I absolutely agree that Gordon Brown is an honourable man with high ethical standards, but all the evidence was there that the economy was overheating and he misjudged it. Being virtuous does not stop you making honest mistakes.''

of course not. An honest mistake, trusting True Conservative values- that those who would be helped to become very rich would massively contribute to society on the way. That is not incompetence- it is misplaced trust. I have known many very rich people in my parents and grand-parents generation - very well off- but happy for a good proportion of their wealth going for education and social nets, etc. Now the same people will just continue to get richer and richer, to the point that they are so much so that they can't even spend their money... and also quite happy to keep piling it up without contributing to the welfare or the less able, less fortunate, and the country.

This is where GB got it wrong- he applied his strong Protestant ethics to the Conservatives who run over them with glee and filled their pockets.

The Tories in the past 14 years have made gigantic mistakes- NOT at all honest mistakes, but deliberate mistakes that would further fill their pockets and that of their friends- as we all know now.

And knowing that they will lose the next GE, are further and further scuppering the country, continuing to fill their own pockets before they leave the country bankrupt. Honest?

Doesn't really matter how or why someone made a mistake, all that matters is trying to live with the results afterwards.

I disagree.

We will have to live with the results of this Government's disastrous decision and mismanagement - and it will be much harder to do because it was 100% dishonest and pure greed, and calculated.

Back to the privatisation of the NHS please. If you want to discuss Gordon Brown- start a new thread, please.

It is very clear from some posts that there are strong and 'illegal' bridges between Private health care and NHS. The Private sector happy to take on all the lucrative stuff, helping people to cut the queues, and then switching back to NHS when it is not to easy of money making. New regs were supposed to stop that- it is very clear that it has not.

Fleurpepper

Amalegra

An excellent comment! The hysteria that we are encouraged to believe about ‘privatisation’ is to no one’s benefit. We do indeed need to look at other models of healthcare that are getting it right! I do not believe that the Labour Party is the answer to many of the country’s problems, let alone the NHS. Remember PFI? (Blair government). Often an expensive mess! A cross party, or even Royal, Commission should be established to examine this, preferably one that will not take a decade to do so! It would also be helpful if the nation as a whole could take better care of its health. So many severe illnesses which cost the health service so dear, are lifestyle induced. Whatever happens, change must come soon as we can’t keep being encouraged to worship at the shrine of an institution which is costing us so much yet failing us so badly.

And what do you call this Amalegra?

'Groundbreaking new dementia drugs are likely to be the preserve of the rich while NHS patients will be subject to a “massive postcode lottery” when they become available for the first time in the UK, according to the co-chair of the government’s national mission to tackle the condition.

Amid multiple scientific and pharmaceutical breakthroughs – the latest of which, donanemab, is to have its full clinical trial results published at a conference in the Netherlands on Monday – more research funding and the establishment of a dedicated government taskforce, it should be a promising time for tackling the disease that affects more than 850,000 people in Britain.

But Hilary Evans, who is also chief executive of Alzheimer’s Research UK, has warned that even though a licensed treatment could become available in as little as 12 to 18 months, it will be available only to “small pockets of the UK”. And for it to be widely available even in five to 10 years’ time, huge systemic changes are needed.'

The problem with the new drugs are that they are extremely expensive because drugs firms have to recoup the costs of research, development and clinical trials as soon as they can.

They have to be approved by NICE both on cost and clinical effectiveness grounds and whether the side effects would be grounds for concern.
The NHS cannot just decide whether to use them or not until they have been approved.

Sometimes new drugs will not be approved for whatever reasons but occasionally pressure from doctors, patients and charities will persuade NICE to change their decision. This could be the case with the new dementia drugs.

As soon as new drugs come off licence other firms can start to make their own version and costs will drop.

yes, a big discussion needs to take place about expensive drugs. Some cancer drugs are massively expensive, with a possible life extension of a few weeks. Does it always make sense? If it was my daughter or grand-daughter, I'd probably think so. But away from very personal circumstances, probably not. Same for a lot of medication and treatment.

Same for end of life care- when all quality of life has gone, does it make sense to continue to over treat, over feed, over medicate. During Covid, I heard a geriatrician saying that modern medicine has 'robbed the very elderly of death- like pneumonia, etc.

But this should apply to all- not just NHS patients, or in the case of expensive drugs, just private.

I keep getting adverts for ear syringing etc. It made me think back to when our GP did that. Then that stopped. Patients started to have problems seeing a chiropodist. Now it’s difficult to get an appointment to even see a doctor. I have a dental check up on Thursday. I’m half expecting them to tell me they’re going private. It’s like a drip drip thing that people are now just accepting as normal. They said on the news that they’re increasing the time at crossings because obese people take longer to cross the road. Years ago I used to see how many people in America were obese and thought to myself that we always seemed to follow America.why are we not doing more to reduce obesity here? ( I do understand that loss of mobility makes it difficult to keep one’s weight down and that’s no one’s fault but I see so many obese children now). I thought Johnson was going to do something about the obesity problem but that was another empty promise. Everything just seems to be getting worse and worse. And, I’ve just spoken to someone on the phone who’s told me how long she’s got to wait to have a telephone consultation with a doctor(5 weeks) and how many months a relative of hers has got to wait for a mastectomy

These last posts are hitting the nail on the head.

Very emotional ethical dilemmas as its not just drugs, its expensive procedures too. And some unpopular decisions made to maintain levels of care on what we currently have within reason expected.

The refusal of the govt to negotiate with doctors and the RCN is not helping matters but I think this is part of the govt plan. Three more of the doctors who graduated with my DD are leaving to work abroad. Before anyone says they should work for x years or pay back their training costs, they have worked in the NHS for 7 years. They are all midway through specialist training and are absolutely essential to the running of the NHS, often being the most senior doctor in the hospital outside daytime hours. My DD starts the second part of her training to become a consultant anaesthetist in August, basic pay £43,500, she will get an uplift for working nights and unsocial hours and generally works a 12 hour shift with at least 30 mins tacked on at either end for "handover" She won't get paid overtime if for some reason her shift over runs eg she needs to stay to talk to relatives or she's suddenly called to an emergency just before her shift ends. She's been working as a locum this year direct for a large hospital so no agency costs. She didn't get a further training post in a part of the country she wanted to work in, there's huge competition for places and anaesthetics training is especially short of training places, so many junior doctors have to mark time during their training, goodness knows how they are going to manage training even more junior doctors. She is getting paid £1,000 approx for a 12 hour shift, that's the "market rate" for the skills she brings, it's enabled her to pay off her student debt, given her flexibility to have a life outside medicine and tbh she looks better than I've seen her look for several years! It's becoming more acceptable for junior doctors to request part time contracts during training because they want to stay in medicine, avoid burnout and can make up their salary by working the occasional locum shift, thus reducing the staffing even further. These are the consequences of not paying or treating people properly.

M0nica

there is no intention of any political party to privatise the NHS, whatever that might mean. We are one of many countries providing a free public health service to their inhabitants and there are many and various waysof doing this.

When public helath services are ranked, we come seventh. The things we are worse at are giving patients access to resources and the quality of our health outcomes. the two real basics of care.

I thinkwe need to have a damn good look at the ways other countries do the same job better and learn from them.

👏👏👏👏

Further to my post, Students entering med school at the same time as DD would have expected to be paid a basic rate of £58,750 p.a. at this stage in their career if salaries had kept pace with inflation, a difference of £15,225. Perhaps this explains why doctors are refusing to settle.

I have referred to this speech elsewhere but feel it could feed in to this discussion. At The Conference for the future of Britain 2023 This was in the section of speakers headed Transforming Public Services.

Transforming Health - Professor Sir John Bell explains the importance of life sciences to the UK economy and set out how science and technology can transform our approach to health and care by shifting the focus to prevention and health creation – vital for economic growth, a sustainable NHS and enabling people to lead longer and healthier lives.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6sK43iB0CU

Blinko

M0nica

there is no intention of any political party to privatise the NHS, whatever that might mean. We are one of many countries providing a free public health service to their inhabitants and there are many and various waysof doing this.

When public helath services are ranked, we come seventh. The things we are worse at are giving patients access to resources and the quality of our health outcomes. the two real basics of care.

I thinkwe need to have a damn good look at the ways other countries do the same job better and learn from them.

👏👏👏👏

I agree

Aveline

Blinko

M0nica

there is no intention of any political party to privatise the NHS, whatever that might mean. We are one of many countries providing a free public health service to their inhabitants and there are many and various waysof doing this.

When public helath services are ranked, we come seventh. The things we are worse at are giving patients access to resources and the quality of our health outcomes. the two real basics of care.

I thinkwe need to have a damn good look at the ways other countries do the same job better and learn from them.

👏👏👏👏

I agree

I think you'll all find that the first thing that 'other countries' do to make their health services better is to put more money into them. We've seen the figures on spending in other countries.

Why on earth people think that there can be improvement to services without spending any money on it is a complete mystery to me.

Even just running a vast fact finding exercise to identify where and how to improve would be very costly. This is a point which MOnica refuses to address...

I think most would agree with Prof Sir John Bell there are two main problems with moving to this model that I can see. Firstly, encouraging people to take responsibility for improving their own health is not straightforward. Take obesity, smoking and excess alcohol use, we all know that these are precursors to many diseases that currently make up the bulk of comorbities that cost the NHS so much but we also know that getting people to change their habits is extremely difficult. He talks about using data to inform us of risk but re-read the threads on here about statins and there is resistance from some to take them! The evidence of the efficacy of taking statins in later life is data driven yet some won't believe it applies to them. I've read posts on here about people who don't want their data used because they fear it will be used for the wrong reasons tbh they can have all my data with pleasure!
Secondly, whilst moving to a new model of healthcare, we would still need to fund the existing model properly and he doesn't tackle this at all. Even if a new model was set up now, there will still be a need for late stage disease treatment for huge numbers of people as they age and who won't have benefitted from a different way of looking at health.
I certainly don't believe this is the way our current govt is intending to take the NHS as prevention of disease is not as profitable as treatment except it might lead to more of us taking medication at an earlier stage of our life but with much better outcomes.

It's not due to lack of money. This is a chart from the King's Fund paper on OCD data. That 12.8 is the number for the UK. You can see that in some years, we're second only to the US in terms of the amount of money we throw it our healthcare system, and we're always in the top third. So the idea that we don't have enough money in Healthcare system is incorrect, and for that large amount of money, we've actually got a relatively catastrophic outset of outcomes.

This is avoidable mortality rates and you can see we're right ..., well actually not. Thank goodness for the USA because they're always the worst at all this stuff. But, just to be clear we're the second worst. So you know, there's a bit of work to do here for sure and one of the reasons is that the NHS has really become a technology averse Healthcare system. It's really almost bulletproof against new technology.

If you look at the amount of money we spend on drugs, particularly new drugs, it's much lower than most of our peers. If you look at our access to technology like CT scans and MRI scanners again with a little box right at the right, we just don't do it and as a result the system is really disabled because we haven't taken up the innovative options.

This is a small section from the talk (10 minutes) I linked. There are a satisfying number of graphs and models but I can't reproduce them here.

It seems to be less about a lack of money and more about the areas where the money is spent, Maisie.

Frankly, DAR, I don't trust the OECD figures, when we have seen figures such as some posted, I think on this thread, which show that we spend far less than Germany and France.

This wikipedia entry uses OECD data and shows that the UK comes nowhere near the US in health spending, and spending by other OECD countries are in excess of the UKs.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita

So the assertion that the UK's spending is sometimes second only to the US looks very dubious.

This links to an image search for comparative spending. Find one where the UK is second to the US...

duckduckgo.com/?q=comparative+spending+by+countries+on+health+care&t=chromentp&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Nor can I summon up much respect for a speaker who uses phrases such as 'the amount of money we throw it'. This is populist, emotive language which doesn't sit well with a purportedly objective examination of our current problems.

Duckduckgo.com or

Sir John Irving Bell GBE CH FRS FMedSci FREng
Who is a Canadian-British immunologist and geneticist. From 2006 to 2011, he was President of the United Kingdom's Academy of Medical Sciences, and since 2002 he has held the Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford

I wonder why you think he would risk his reputation by producing spurious figures, Maisie.

He was very impressive and reassuring during Covid.

If you actually watched the short video Maisie or read my post, you will see he said that in some years, we're second only to the US in terms of the amount of money we throw it our healthcare system but he also said that we're always in the top third. Which means that in some years we may well spend (far) less than Germany and France.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I wonder why you think he would risk his reputation by producing spurious figures, Maisie.

I have no idea, but the recent OECD figures contradict him.

I'd like to know which years he was talking about. Perhaps they were pre 2010 when the Labour government actually adequately funded the NHS.

And however well qualified he might be it doesn't guarantee that he agrees with the current model of NHS funding or has no biases...