NHS Reforms: Crisis in Leadership?

April 13, 2011 By Malcolm Blair-Robinson

There can be no doubt that the Department of Health is in serious political trouble over its reforms. How it got there is a mystery. The broad thrust of the new ideas are right. Detail can be adjusted. The Bill is half way through Parliament. Yet opposition grows, Milliband grows more strident, Lib Dems are in another turmoil, Downing Street is in a state of near panic and the nurses have lost confidence in the Secretary of State for Health.

This blog has lost confidence in the current NHS and in particular the Minister for Public Health in England, Anne Milton MP. Interviewed today, she was challenged on the fact that following the abolition of targets, A&E patients were being kept waiting for more than four hours in some cases. Her answer was that what was important was not the waiting time, but the quality of the treatment when you finally got it.

This is preposterous. What is the matter with the mentality of the people who are involved in the NHS? Nobody should wait in A&E for more than ten minutes and in 1980 nobody had to. How can it possibly be defensible for a health service to keep stricken patients waiting for four hours in an emergency? Would we wait four hours for a meal in a pub, or four hours for a routine train, or four hours for a play to start in a theatre, or four hours for an ambulance? No , because every other sort of service organises itself to deliver. But the NHS sees itself not as a service but a process and that process must take its course.

That is why it has to be reformed and if it is incapable of reform, shut down. It would be better to start again. Health Ministers must get a grip. Put more bluntly, this is a nettle that has to be grasped.