As a keen follower of the adventures of Lord Darzi I often read his blog about what he is doing around the UK. This week he was in Kettering to launch the East Midlands Strategic Health Review, entitled catchily “From Evidence to Excellence”
This vision for world class healthcare across the East Midlands region aims “to save lives improve standards and put safety first. Top of the agenda are strategies for improving the quality of care and ensuring patients are seen quickly and in a convenient location. The document also outlines steps to encourage local people to lead healthy lives. The vision also heralds an increased investment in staffing and midwifery-led services.”
Nothing there anyone could object to! But we have all heard it before. The phrase “midwifery-led services” of course is shorthand for “No Doctors” and “investment in staffing” opens the door for more managers because the missing word there is “clinical” since “investment in clinical staffing” is a far cry from “investment in staffing”
The whole process is designed to give an appearance of local consultation and involvement but in my opinion Darzi is making decisions based on orders from above sand these decisions are not influenced one iota by local consultation. As the economy slides further into recession and the hidden PFI Debt starts to take bigger and bigger chunks of NHS Spending then the real agenda will emerge. Which is of course keeping Labour in power by spend, spend, spend policies that bring short term gain but which fairly shortly are going to inflict long term pain on all of us. (Except the politicians who caused it of course, they will have their own nests well feathered against a rainy day!)
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