Monday, November 20, 2006

You couldn't make it up

As if Patricia Hewitt's NHS wasn't shagged enough, we now learn that NHS hospitals are feeling obliged to market themselves to local GPs, because under the brave new scheme of internal markets within the NHS, after years of assumption that they operated a local monopoly, it seems that hospitals are competing for "customers".

BBC TV news featured a typical NHS administrator, all power suits and media-training, telling us that this is a good idea. But it seems like it's just another distraction by pointless NHS management to justify their precarious existence at a time when health budgets are being squeezed dry as a result of poor administration by so-called power-dressed and media-friendly "professional managers".

Most medical staff have given up hope of discovering method in the madness of the modern bureaucracy-mad NHS, and seem to be of the heretical opinion that there are better uses what little money they have left - for despite the huge spending increases of the past few years, many hospitals are actually laying off medical staff because they have simply run out of money. However, such poorly informed comment only goes to show how badly these doctors and nurses are in need of re-education and enlightment by Hewitt's ever-vigilant thought police.

But however hard you try and spin it, there remains no shortage of patients and waiting lists. And no surfeit of facilities, equipment or humble politicans willing to admit that NHS reorganisation has been a cockup of biblical proportions with £700,000,000,000 of your money

But at least when you attend the local flea pit and watch the wobbly adverts between the feature films for local restaurants, you may well be regaled with a glossy commercial, produced at your expense: "And when that dodgy vindaloo does its worst, why not ask your doctor to consider checking you into the Royal Gut and Gizzard Hospital, quoting bonus code 9876..."

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