There is hardly a day that goes by when the BBC isn’t running an ‘NHS in crisis’ story usually as a result of ‘a BBC exclusive investigation’…so you know they have gone out looking for these stories, which aren’t hard to find of course. The NHS is massive, over 1.5 million employees and in England alone deals with over 1 million patients every 36 hours. Any wonder you will find stories of some sort of failure…add to that the population is growing rapidly due to immigration and the resultant added pressure on the NHS is endless and relentless.
The BBC just likes to dig out the negative stories which they like to present as ‘worthy’ news but are in fact mostly moral showboating that fills up the airtime and has the happy side-effect of damaging the Tories…they hope. This morning on 5Live we were warned of a crisis in palliative care…not enough funds, ruthless bean-counters who don’t care about the patients and nowhere near enough care available. The unfortunate woman who was wheeled in as an example of that failure had a husband and a daughter who both needed palliative care…when the husband died the NHS withdrew some of the funds the wife received to look after him and then when the daughter also died she lost more funding and her motability car that was to provide transport for the daughter. The wife lost some of my sympathy when she seemed to expect this funding and provison of a car to continue…she said she felt she just couldn’t work anymore…..undoubtedly there are always wrinkles in the NHS funding system that means people don’t get everything they need but when the reason for that provision is no longer there they can’t expect to keep receiving the money….other patients will need it.
Why does the BBC keep on insisting in ramping up these small personal problems into massive signs of the NHS in crisis?
Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph suggests a reason……
‘I once used to dabble in “investigatve journalism”, so I know how soul destroying it can be to spend months beavering away at some supposed great scandal in public life only to find that the more you look into it, the less it turns out to be. The temptation to ramp it up into something it’s not is hard to resist. I therefore have some sympathy with the BBC Panorama team and their work on the exotically named ” Paradise Papers”. We were promised a series of revelations that would blow the lid on supposedly rampant international tax avoidance; what we got actually didn’t add up to a hill of beans.
Try as it did the BBC failed to demonstrate anything significantly untoward and yet it left the impression of shameful misuse by multinationals of offshore havens to avoid paying their share. You can see why commerce prefers to keep its affairs private when subjected to this kind of knocking and substantially ignorant, anti-business treatment.’
A pretty accurate summation of how the BBC goes about its business..basically mud-slinging…it repeatedly protrayed the use of tax havens as ‘secret’ operations, secret investments, highly secret documents of the rich and powerful….no…they were just private….as you and I like to think our own bank accounts and financial affairs are. ‘Secret’ is a perjorative word carefully chosen to build a narative of something being hidden…and if it’s ‘hidden’ that must be because it is illegal or immoral…and thus they have something to hide. The BBC inventing a story where there is none…or none of any significance.
Just the BBC trying to create a narrative that we are being robbed by the ‘rich and powerful’ using ‘secret’ investments that no one knows about….except they are all entirely legal and everyone knows about off-shore bankng and investment…the BBC indulges in a bit of it itself. Ireland is a tax haven, indeed the UK is a tax haven with relatively low corporate tax rates. The BBC has just chosen to target those it thinks would seem to help Jeremy Corbyn and his anti-capitalist drive in the same way it targets the NHS and presents it as in crisis all the time.
The BBC…Corbyn’s useful idiots on tap.
For the record – and from personal experience in my bit of London palliative care for dementia is an insult. Maybe for cancer they get the flags out but all I saw were a couple of useless so called nurses who seem more interested in killing their patient than helping those near the end.
The international health service will never have enough money. It pays third world doctors and Nurse who barely speak English good pay and they go agency. I’ve said here before it would be best privatised over a number of years so that people are responsible for themselves. I’m happy to be challenged but the al Beeb site probably isn’t the right place. At least al Beeb could help their health service to reduce rampant fraud.
“For the record – and from personal experience in my bit of London palliative care for dementia is an insult.”
Fedup, I don’t know the details of services in London, but I can give you a bit of general background. Thirty years ago Old Age Psychiatry was a specialty in its own right and most mental health providers (we weren’t Trusts in those days) had a specialist directorate for it. This wasn’t a dementia service as such because it would also deal with functional illnesses in those over 65 (e.g. depression).
This structure survived the 1990s creation of Trusts, but it started to fall apart when District Health Authorities were split up into Commissioning Groups/Trusts. Each of these smaller units wanted services dedicated to their specific area (co-terminous boundaries was the phrase used) and so the provider Trusts were internally reconfigured from clinical specialties to geographical entities – localities. Children’s psychiatric services were usually too small the be split up, but services for older people and working age adults were divided into smaller units, but then to minimise the increase in management costs they were merged with each other. Instead of 1 Old Age and 1 Working Age service in a mental health Trust you’d have 3 or 4 localities each with All Age services.
In any All Age service the needs of working age adults will be seen to be the priority. In simplistic terms older people might kill themselves but young people might kill others – much more difficult to explain to the coroner. At the same time the government wanted more efforts made to either keep people in work or help them return to work. Resources for older people were cut, day care was closed and the downward spiral was underway.
One of my motivations for building up services for older people was that eventually I might need them. Now I pray that I never will.
Apologies to most Forum members as the above has nothing to do with the BBC – except that it’s real life so won’t ever be featured in a BBC documentary.
RJ,
Thank you. I have enough experience of the public service to know that things are always a matter of priority – the people running the country have chosen to bin the elderly and prioritised other areas – such as my favourite hate – overseas aid. They can find 13 billion for that but someone show me a real gain to me – a taxpayer .
I wrote to my mp about my experience – he forwarded it to the dept of health and I got a pro forma letter from Mr Cunt – as jimnaughtie would call him. More inquiries, more reports, more recommendations, more long grass, more nothing . Any politician is the same and al Beeb is too busy worrying about silly wimmin going to Iran to spy or MPs touching each other up.
“real life so won’t ever be featured in a BBC documentary.”
The BBC is reliable only as a source of information about what the Left want you to think this week, and who they want you to hate. Extract the self-serving Leftist propaganda from the BBC and barely anything remains.
When I was my NHS Trust’s liaison contact with the county Social Services department a regular item in the Social Services budget monitoring meeting was the cost of taxi fares for disabled people. Most of the expenditure was uncontentious, but there was a line for taxi fares for families with disabled children where the children were too disabled to use public transport. There would be a footnote on how many of the families also had a Motability vehicle because the child was too disabled to use public transport. In each case the parents were using the vehicle for their own use while the county was paying to transport the child.
The unanimous view at each meeting was that each family should be offered a choice, taxi fares or a vehicle. We didn’t mind which they chose, but they shouldn’t have both. The Director of Social Services took a different view, on the basis that he would be crucified in the local papers and on TV if he took any action that could be presented as being against the interests of any family with a disabled child. He accepted that paying for a Motability car that wasn’t used to transport a child was a misuse of public money, but the saving wasn’t worth the grief it would cause him. The message to his department was “when in doubt, don’t cause trouble, spend the money”.
There wasn’t that much diffence in the NHS. Shroud waving works because the media love it. The biggest bollocking I ever received was the year I came in with a £300,000 underspend.
We didn’t mind which they chose, but they shouldn’t have both. The Director of Social Services took a different view, on the basis that he would be crucified in the local papers and on TV if he took any action that could be presented as being against the interests of any family with a disabled child.
That’s the problem in a nutshell: fear of the mob. In this case the powerful disability lobby plus the omnipresent, hysterical, Twitterati.
My disabled half-brother (aged 48) lives in sheltered accommodation with two others (46 and 67) and they all get 24/7 care. Fair enough – except he and another get a Motability car each. None of the three has severe mental or physical disabilities and I doubt they do more than 5000 miles annually between them yet they each get a new car every 3 years. For a couple of years or so when one of the carers was on duty who could not drive they had to resort to taxis, leaving both cars unused on the drive and thus doubling up the costs of their transport.
A colossal waste of money, yet no government of any political hue has the balls to do anything about it. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. We will continue to run a large deficit under successive Eunuch Governments until we end up like Greece with a catastrophic financial collapse.
I can’t wait to see how the BBC reports THAT, though I suspect Fatcher will be to blame in some way.
Thanks RJ
The losses across the whole country must be enormous. Unfortunately the sense of entitlement now bred into many British is there to stay . It’s a long way from the safety net of Beveridge. Al Beeb obviously adds to this entitlement with the institutional avoidance of blame or personal responsibility. I would never dream of having a kid if I couldn’t pay and be responsible for it. Such an idea is so archaic that it make me (some might say) a kind of work house monster.
Jeremy Warner: “I therefore have some sympathy with the BBC Panorama team and their work on the exotically named ” Paradise Papers”. We were promised a series of revelations that would blow the lid on supposedly rampant international tax avoidance; what we got actually didn’t add up to a hill of beans.”
But it does provide a very useful distraction from Mossack Fonseca. The BBC have stopped revealing stuff from those papers.
I wonder why?
Proper name : The Paradise Distractions