Before Naughtie’s hatchet job on Cameron he tried slipping the scalpel into Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt at 08:10.
Naughtie begins by telling us that the NHS and its future is at the heart of the General Election….which is why it important that news organisations like the BBC get their facts straight.
But do they?
Naughtie claims that the Kings Fund has said that the ‘government has produced an NHS that has run out of money and was operating at the limits of its abilities.’
The government produced an NHS? Aren’t the problems in the NHS due to an aging population, a population that is rapidly increasing due to Labour’s immigration policy, ever more expensive drugs and the increasing availability of modern, complex and expensive medical procedures that the Public demand?
The government hasn’t just maintained NHS funding but increased it…..so I can’t quite see how Naughtie can characterise this as the government’s fault per se.
Naughtie claims that the money has ‘been wasted on a vast reorganisation of the NHS.’
Hunt tells him that the reforms, as said by the King’s Fund, save £1.5 billion per year.
Naughtie says that ‘There’s no argument about the numbers’…despite him previously claiming there were no savings only ‘money wasted’ and then ignores his own statement and claims that ‘the idea that the reforms have saved money is an idea that most people in the NHS do not accept…the costs of reorganisation are very, very high indeed!’
So despite Hunt and the King’s Fund saying that the reforms save money, and Naughtie agreeing that there’s no argument about the numbers, he then completely dismisses that and goes on to claim that the costs are enormous.
Here is what the King’s Fund says (Odd how one thing the Fund says is the gold standard, the next it’s rubbish depending on whether it supports Naughtie’s view or not)…
The government estimates the total cost of the reforms to be in the region of £1.5 billion – mainly consisting of the financial costs of closing down abolished organisations, setting up new ones and making redundancy payments. But it is argued that this has been offset by cumulative financial savings from abolishing a managerial tier of the NHS and cutting the number of commissioning staff of nearly £5 billion over the parliament (and an estimated £1.5 billion per year thereafter).
Others have queried these estimates of both the costs (too small) and the savings (too big). And while estimating a net financial benefit from the reforms, the National Audit Office has questioned the detail of the government’s cost estimates.
As finances have tightened, the NHS has done well to generally maintain increasing trends in workloads. It is not surprising then that the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest productivity across the NHS in the UK (not just England) for the three years 2010 to 2012 has improved by 1.6 per cent per year. This is more than the long-run average of 0.7 per cent – but is much lower than the 3 per cent to 4 per cent per year needed to close the funding gap.
So he King’s Fund admits that the ONS says that there is a net benefit and that productivity has also increased.
But it also says this revealing statement….
Even with the net financial benefit, such organisational restructuring and reviewing of central budgets did not require the total reform or an act of parliament – the squeeze on funding would have been enough to ensure this would happen.
So the organisational restructuring and review of budgets would still have had to have happened due to the financial constraints….so there was no escape from them reform or no reform.
It is also notable that the NHS has the second highest approval rating in its history from the Public…that’s despite what Naughtie claims to be a very, very expensive and vast reform of the NHS.
It seems that Naughtie had his agenda and stuck to it regardless of the facts….so on the subject of the NHS, at the heart of the General Election, we get absolute rubbish from one of the BBC’s top interviewers on its premier news programme.
Might as well have Clarkson on the show punching those he disapproves of and raving about those he likes….about as informative as Naughtie and vastly more entertaining.
I’ve said on another thread that although Lansley (Con) was bad Milburn (Lab) was much worse.
The NHS needs to evolve constantly to cope with demographic and technological change. The problems come when the Department of Health / Secretary of State decide that there has to be revolution not evolution. That would work if there was a revolution every generation, but instead we’ve had a revolution every parliament. Just looking at the commissioning structure over the last 20 years we’ve gone from District Health Authorities to G P Fundholding to Super G P Fundholding to Primary Care Groups to Primary Care Trusts to merged Primary Care Trusts to Care Commissioning Groups – and I might have missed some out. Each change comes at huge expense and disrupts the real work of the service. The best analogy I’ve heard is that the NHS is constantly planning for the perfect wedding, but with no thought on how to make the marriage work.
But ignoring the need to evolve leaves health services in an even worse place. To look at Labour’s alternative to the last 5 years of Conservative Re-Disorganisation you only have to look at the shambles of the Welsh NHS. Last month I was talking to a consultant working in Wales, who’s view was that Wales would have no choice but to implement most of the English changes – he just hoped that the lessons from England would be heeded and the changes be planned properly (pause for hysterical laughter).
Outside the NHS there is a saying “If it isn’t broken don’t fix it”. Inside the Department of Health the policy is “If it isn’t broken – break it”. And then they get accountants in to tell us that the glue to fix it properly is too expensive.
Not that you’d know any of this from the BBC.
‘Naughtie says that ‘There’s no argument about the numbers’…
Heard that brain donor teaching assistant Labour Minister raise ‘the numbers’ too with Andrew Neil… didn’t go well.
Be fun to hear AN debate his colleague who, on the wrong side of the pulpit I suspect would acquire the sudden institutional Alzheimers and Mind Blank that seems to afflict political and BBC top floor market rate talents.
Labour want the NHS to be at the centre of the election and by an extraordinary coincidence, the BBC thinks it is too. But is it, or should it be?
It should be, but only if they talk about what went wrong at Stafford and Morecambe Bay – and if the BBC can bring itself to admit that the system failed while Labour were in power. But that would implicate Andy Burnham, so the BBC have to pretend that all the problems started in 2010.