Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tear Down the NHS 2
Following the article in The Times yesterday, in the Daily Mail Judith Allen writes a similar account of the collapse of ethos and the rise of bureaucratic cruelty among NHS nurses. These two articles signal an important chance in press attitudes towards nurses. Not long ago, you could hardly read the worse 'nurse' in tabloid without finding the word 'angel' nearby. Now they are routinely cast as villains. This is good news as it suggests an opening up of the politics of the NHS. Perhaps people are at last beginning to realise the extent of its failure. Meanwhile, our cancer survival rates are terrible. The NHS is a sovietised bureaucracy that kills people in order to sustain itself.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
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ReplyDeleteHey? Anyway, Bryan, the state of the NHS is a shockingly under-reported national scandal. Three members of my family work in it and the scale of the cuts enforced by poor management and the boom and bust mentality created by the thoughtless Brownian cash splurge are beyond belief. We seem to have descended into a Kafkasesque society where we are all powerless in the face of well-meaning but hell-bound politicians who have no knowledge of running anything bar a tap. Why has Britain fallen so far, so suddenly?
ReplyDeleteYears ago when the USSR still existed my mother spoke to a British orthopaedic surgeon who had just been showing some Soviet doctors around his hospital in England. He was astonished when one of them started to cry and upon asking what he had done to offend, was told that they had never come across such kindness to patients in the Soviet system and were moved beyond words. How sad that we seem to have taken a leaf out of Soviet Russia's book.
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