Being Lazy

Apologies for the posting being a bit light this week.

I really have to address the Tory proposals for the NHS published last week. It just feels too much like work right now. Suffice to say, they are ill-thought out. Actually I'll quickly dive into it now.

Merging Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) together and abolishing SHAs (Strategic Health Authorities). While there is a case for the PCT move (I'll explain why in the next week), this will end up centralising the NHS even more than in it was in 1997, I'm not sure that squares with the Tories' stated aim of moving decisions as close to the grassroots as possible.

Abolishing targets, but actually not abolishing targets. This is a con-job, they say in one breath that central targets are disorting the performance of the NHS, but on in the next breath propose that the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) will set the targets instead.

Last but not least for now. Give the private sector the right of supply to the NHS. That's right, even if Yeovil Hospital had spare capacity, they would be forced by law to outsource some of it's clinical activity to private companies. What's that all about?