The Sunak government has actually done something positive for the NHS

This Green and Strangely Pleasant Land - NHS

I know it’s hard to believe but it would appear that the government has actually done something useful to improve the National Health Service.

Moreover, by the standards of these things, it’s not that costly, a mere £240m (that’s less than the price of sending  than one and a half asylum seekers to Rwanda on the madcap and evil scheme to deport them).

The government’s new NHS plan brings a digital telephone system into surgeries starting next March. If it works it should offer a more civilised way of getting to a doctor or dentist appointment and would end the nightmare of desperate early morning calls and long waiting times as patients try to secure a doctor’s appointment.  

The current system is just bonkers and works for nobody. Instead of having a couple of harassed receptionists handling appointments there is a way of doing this digitally.

That begs the question of whether the system will actually work in practise because a combination of the words government and new technology is far from guaranteed to produce a happy result.  Moreover there is the more substantial problem of an acute shortage of general practitioners and an even greater shortage of NHS dentists. Digitalisation does not whisk up medical staff but it offers the prospect of making their work more effective.

This initiative is part of the government’s grandly named Primary Care Recovery Plan which is also designed to take some pressure off doctors and dentists by handing over more routine procedures to nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals who are in fact highly trained but of far lower status in the medical hierarchy.

As matters stand the most highly trained members of the medical profession spend swathes of time filling in forms, dealing with routine medical procedures and engaging in massive bouts of box ticking.

This initiative sort of addresses this insanity but does so by putting a lot of pressure on vastly overburdened pharmacists, technicians and nurses who are already under pressure and deserting the NHS precisely because they are overworked and underpaid.

Instead of addressing pay issues the government prefers to wage battles with its staff. Rather than viewing NHS staff it might just consider paying them more. Or it could be looking at a host of ways that would make staff happier, such as training medical staff for free in return for a timed requirement to work for the NHS.

As matters stand there is a massive staffing crisis which has resulted in over 93,000 staff vacancies across the service. The exodus from the NHS is not a given but this government is too preoccupied with being ‘tough’ in pay negotiations as it thinks there is something quite wonderful about ‘standing up to the NHS unions’, even though the reality, as reflected in strike ballots, is that the unions are doing no more than representing the views of the overwhelming majority of their members.

As politicians never cease to remind us there is no such thing as a magic money tree to conjure up cash for endless demands on the public purse but there is such a thing as priorities. If the health of the nation is not much of a priority maybe now is the time to explain why.

Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, famously said that ‘priorities is the language of socialism’. Before those who dislike socialism get too excited by this, they should understand that Mr Bevan was in fact cautioning Labour Party members to be restrained in their demands for indiscriminate public spending, urging them to carefully consider their real priorities. Paying staff better rather than paying private agencies to fill the gaps in the workforce and finding more innovative ways to make the service more efficient look suspiciously like adopting sane priorities.

Yet, it is hard to imagine this appealing to the increasingly unhinged Tory Party, flaying around as each faction tries to outbid the other with crazy schemes to cut taxes, build bigger tanks for the army,  supply massive aircraft carriers for the navy while sending bucket loads of cash to Rwanda in a hopeless attempt to stop the flow of asylum seekers.

It’s a recipe for economic insanity, something that used to be the preserve of certain sections of the Labour Party. Now that they’ve got all grown up, maybe it’s time to sue for breach of copyright.

Idiot of the week, but not in a good way

Nadine Dorries has taken over eleven weeks to ‘immediately’ resign from parliament where she has neither spoken nor asked a question for over year in the House. The great public interest cause cited for her resignation was her failure to secure a peerage. In an impressive toys-out-of-the-pram resignation letter she accused Prime Minister Sunak of putting her personal safety at risk by whipping up “a public frenzy” against her.

Having gleefully taken public money for neglecting the job she was supposed to do, she secures the accolade of idiot of the week by telling Mr Sunak that,  ‘history will not judge you kindly.’

Nadine, let’s be frank, history is most unlikely to spend much time judging you at all.