Hi Ray,
As a follow-up to this subject, almost all the Sunday papers today are
concerned with the humiliation of the National Health Service in this
country. Comparisons are made between the cleanliness and emptiness of the
emergency reception wards of European hospitals ("they look like the foyers
of first class hotels") and the dirty, overcrowded equivalents in this
country with people lying around in distress on trolleys for hours.
(Incidentally, the cost of operations for those going abroad to French and
German private hospitals [*plus* the travel costs *plus* the travel and the
hotel costs of a wife or husband of the patient] is still about the same as
the basic cost of one operation in the NHS, and in some cases even cheaper!
The variability of costs of the same operations in different NHS hospitals
in England can be as much as 8 times!)
I don't feel humiliated, not because I am a supporter of private enterprise
in the health area, but because the NHS, as with our Education service, as
with several other nationalised activities (including railways --
Railtrack, the important kingpin of the privatised operating companies,
still being civil service controlled) is a good example of top-down control
by what is still a class-ridden establishment of Oxbridge humanity-graduate
types without, however, any specialised knowledge of the areas they are
supervising. (Railtrack, for example, had nobody with railway engineering
experience on its board nor had anybody involved in the Whitehall civil
service.)
The NHS is a good example of a form of centralised civil service
organisation that is unable to cope with complexity and customer service.
As far as I am aware, the permanent secretaries and senior civil servants
in the Ministry of Health who have decided the policy of the NHS since 1947
have never -- repeat, never -- been doctors or in any way medically or
scientifically qualified.)
Let me repeat my experience with my prostate treatment of last year because
it is typical of what goes on in the NHS. This involved seeing my local
doctor (10 minutes), having a biopsy (30 minutes), talking with a
consultant (15 minutes) , having a flow test (5 minutes) talking with
another consultant (15 minutes), receiving 35 daily X-Ray treatments
(2-minutes each). But all this took 11 months to achieve through the NHS!!!!
If I ran a private health-care centre, particularly if I specialised in
prostate cancer, I reckon that I could treat the average prostate patient
such as myself well within three months from start to finish. Comfortably!
Without rushing or pressurising anyone involved. Also, I would make sure
that the very expensive X-Ray equipment (at least $2m) was used about 15
hours a day in two shifts for six days a week (as it would in industry)
instead of only 4 hours a day for five days (as in the local NHS hospital)
and that, as a consequence, I reckon that my enterprise could probably
treat between at least 5- and probably 10-times as many patients with mild
to moderately serious symptoms of prostate cancer as the present NHS.
In other words, if treatment for prostate cancer were allowed to be
privatised (which is inevitably going to happen with the present breakdown
of the NHS) then 30,000 deaths a year from prostate cancer could probably
be reduced to 5,000 or 10,000 at the most.
Keith
P.S. Despite being made insolvent by two World Wars in the last century,
England has recovered to be the fourth richest country in the world -- so
someone (that is, private enterprise) is still doing something right, even
though our politicians and civil service departments have been generally
pretty incompetent (the last example being the �30-40 billion cost of the
foot-and-mouth epidemic last year made worse by delays by the senior civil
servants of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture [not a single one of them
a scientist or a veterinary specialist, of course!] [these being about six
salary grades down and kept on one side and consulted when the senior civil
servants felt like it.] Not a single one of these senior civil servants
bothered to read the full official report that was written after the
previous epidemic of 1976 [and were not even aware of it!] and,
consequently, not a single one of its guidelines and recommendations was
followed when the 2000 epidemic struck!).
And these top civil servants are supposed to be the best brains of Oxford
and Cambridge. (Of course, they are not, these days, as they used to be at
the turn of the 1900s. The very brightest are now quietly snapped up by
multinational companies.)
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�Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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