I stole this from my serious Blog, just to show you what you are missing:
I feel I’ve woken up in a horror movie; you know, the Vampire
has been killed, you’re getting on with clearing up all the mess, putting the
garlic back in the cupboard and suddenly it’s coming at you again.
And again.
It’s like that with Sir David Nicholson (dubbed ‘The man with
no shame’), head of NHS England, salary £211,000 a year, pension pot worth £1.9
million. He’s announced he is retiring – but not just yet. You’d think he would
keep his head down, work his passage out?
Oh no. The Vampire lives…
I took the trouble to get hold of his speech to the NHS
Confederation conference last week. That’s the bosses bash, the manager’s knees
up and it makes chilling reading. He’s not done with us yet;
“…. for the meantime I am going to focus on the next
few months the next 10 months that I've got to do a whole series of things that
I really do want to do.”
Hold on you are history – a dead hand on the tiller, surely?
“But I
really want to talk about the future, I want to talk about the future in terms
of what I want to do over the next 10 months or so and what I want to work with
you to do as well. There is as we know an enormous amount to do. And what I
want to talk to you, I want to talk to you about how we can take the steps
needed to promote a positive culture in the NHS. I want to talk to you about
the steps that we need to take to plan for the future, to make sure that we are
not victims of the political debate or the media storms that come and go with
us. How can we take control of the future?”
But you don’t have a future…..surely?
Eh, actually I think he’s got to the ‘in the bunker, chewing
the carpet moment’ that eventually gets all megalomaniacs;
“Now, the
NHS, in my view at the moment, stands at a crossroads in relation to all of
this and we cannot allow the tyranny of the electoral cycle stopping us from
making the real and fundamental changes that we need to make to the NHS, we
cannot allow that to happen this time. We will be letting down our patients and
our communities if we did. So we need to think about how we are going to create
a strategy. A long-term plan that gives sustainability to the NHS. People in
this country should beware of political manifestos that say, with a little bit
of growth, with a bit of management costs savings, with a bit of improvement in
procurement and, oh, a bit of integration, you can solve the long-term problems
of the NHS. You can't.”
What he is saying is that something like the NHS shouldn’t be
left to the whim of some politician, it should be left to the whim of some
administrator like Sir David Nicholson, this bit says it all;
” we cannot
allow the tyranny of the electoral cycle stopping us from making the real and
fundamental changes that we need”
By which he means we
should lose our democratic control over the expenditure of £104 Billions a year
and surrender it to a backroom ‘plan’ that he thinks we aren’t qualified to
comment on, that ‘they’ won’t show us and when we protest – ‘they’ ignore us
(after a sham consultation, of course).
It’s clear to me that building on the example of the
‘Foundation Trusts’, he aims to take the whole NHS out of government control
and put it into some entity we can’t touch but have to pay for. I can see the
attraction;
Managers – Freedom to run it like a business, set your own
salary with no interference from
Parliament or local authorities, let alone those irritating voters..
Politicians – no blame attaches to them when things go wrong.
Doctors/Consultants – just leave it up to us dearie, we know
best.
He’s got 10 months to steal the NHS from us, before he takes
up a few lucrative part time jobs on the boards of suppliers to the NHS.
I actually think that the man who brought us the scandal of
Mid Staffs hospitals is hoping to become Lord Nicholson of Staffordshire as
well.
Only if we let him.
Oh, by the way take a look at this for a ‘jolly’;
“this time
last year we were just building up to the Olympics and there was lots of
scepticism as I remember about the Olympics, but they were absolutely
phenomenal, and one of the things about the Olympics was the opening ceremony
and the way in which the NHS played its role in there and I don't know what it
felt like where you were or what it felt like with the people that you worked
with, I was in London for the whole period because they brought all the health
ministers from all over the world together but I don't know what it felt like where
you were but I felt, there was a swell of feeling about the NHS. I saw it
particularly amongst the ministers from the other countries who were absolutely
overwhelmed by it.”
I was watching it on the TV. I bet he got free tickets.
Neil Harris
(a don’t stop till you drop production)
Home:
helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.comContact: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com
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