The Centre for Policy Studies published a report warning that the National Health Service is “on the brink of implosion” as government plans for a record 40 billion pound cash injection risk being squandered on bureaucracy. The author of the report, Dr Maurice Slevin, is a cancer specialist at a top London teaching hospital:
“I have seen at first hand the steady decay of a great public institution … The NHS is on the brink of implosion.”
Slevin, who came to England from South Africa and now works at Barts and the London NHS Trust, said he was full of enthusiasm when he started working for the NHS 24 years ago. But today it was clear that the quality of care delivered in Britain was far below that of other western countries. He warned that without major reforms, the 40 billion pound promised for the NHS over the next five years would “simply disappear into deeper and deeper layers of bureaucracy, with more and more monitoring of more and more targets.”
“Waste is endemic. The Department of Health itself admits that up to a fifth of the NHS budget is lost through waste, fraud and inefficiency.”
So it’s not more money that needs to be thrown at the public services as some community minded people would have us believe. The NHS is a strange institution, rooted in the meta-context of the collective effort the British nation experienced during the WWII and resisting any rational discourse by both the politicians and the public. Horror stories of patients suffering at the hands of NHS are part of regular reporting routine and yet, it still seems to be a political suicide to talk about real modernisation and de-nationalisation of the health care system.
Public services, being the most direct way for politicians of bribing the public into voting for them, have always been the most sensitive political issue. I have this horrible vision of the entire GDP disappearing into the NHS blackhole before the British public acknowledges the failure of the NHS as a system of health care provision and confronts the gruesome reality of public services.
