The mother was expecting a premature baby but there were no spare incubation facilities in the whole of the NHS hospitals south and midlands of England and the mother had to go to a Manchester hospital to be delivered.
This is an exceptional example of the ineptitude of the NHS but, nevertheless, there are tens of thousands of other cases of ineptitude going on at any one time in this country ranging from the trivial to the serious. At any one time there are hundreds of thousands of people awaiting treatment in our hospitals who have to wait anything from two weeks to 18 months.
One of the ways that the civil service in London try to manage the NHS is by setting targets for the hospitals. If they don't meet these targets, their funding is cut. There are two results from this: (a) hospitals cook their figures egregiously every time they fill in their monthly return forms; (b) they reduce their waiting lists enormously by performing petty operations (such as cosmetic jobs) and leave the expensive operations on the waiting lists.
One manager of a local hospital cooked the figures so much that when he left it was subsequently discovered that the hospital is "in the red", according to the civil service by £40 million. This can only be recovered in the coming years by cutting back on expensive operations even though it means that some staff may be hanging around with nothing to do. Meantime the previous manager is now teaching at university. What is he teaching? -- How to manage NHS hospitals!
My own prostate treatment, which consisted of 35 daily 5-minute X-ray treatments took 11 months to complete from the time of my first visit to our local NHS doctor, three visits to consultants (three visits no doubt in order to augment their treatment figures) and being signed off at the end. It could all have been done in 2 months comfortably.
The X-ray equipment costing 2 million pounds was in use in the hospital for 6 hours a day and taken out of use every fortnight for a day's maintenance. If this equipoment had been used by a private clinic it would be used, like any machine tool of the same cost in industry, for at least a double-shift -- 16 hours a day. In addition, extending the use of X-ray equipment into the evening would also allow many more men to be able to attend for treatment without losing wages. Every year 30,000 men die from prostate cancer. My guess is that if we had a half-way efficient NHS then at least 15,000 of those men would not have died for another 5-15 years, many of them living an enjoyable and/or productive life in the meantime.
Keith Hudson ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 311636; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
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