When you go to the hairdresser you know there are going to be cuts. Sometimes the cuts may be savage; a short, back and sides. You would not tell the hairdresser to choose the cuts. You would not believe a hairdresser who said he could shorten your hair without cutting it.
There are going to be cuts in public services. Of that there is not the slightest doubt. There is only one person in the country who says there will not be any cuts, and that is our discredited Prime Minister. His performance at today's
PMQs was dishonest. He lied. Like the barber purporting to shorten your hair without cutting it, he fools no one. Balls is lying. Liam Bryne, the Chancellor's rotweiller, is lying. Look at this glorious double speak:
"You've got to separate two kinds of spending here. You've got to separate current spending, that is the day-to-day cash in hand. In real terms that grows by 0.7%...
It is a bit of a red herring, I think, to try and mix up capital spending and current spending. You know, if you put the two things together you get the numbers that you talk about. Because of course once you've got a school, you've got a school. Once you've got a hospital, you've got a hospital. The thing that really matters is what happens in the day-to-day current spending. The overall envelope rises by 0.7%."
Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Neither party dare admit that some of the impending cuts will be in health care. But, behind the scenes, the government has already appointed the health care barber. He is none other than Matthew Swindells. Swindells used to work
within the NHS. Now, as so many others have discovered, he can make far more money by working
for the NHS as an independently contracted management consultant.
Matthew Swindells, managing director of the health division of Tribal and former special adviser to then health secretary Patricia Hewitt, said GP services would not face cuts if practices took on more secondary care work.
'Some 30%-40% of patients in hospital don't need to be there. There is a huge gain to be made. It needs a step change, not to replace primary care services, but extend what they are doing.
PULSE
What a c.v.! Patricia Hewitt's spad turns into a management consultant and sells his dubious wares back to the NHS. He now works for
TRIBAL, a super smooth, slick, top of the second divsion management consultancy which makes its money advising the public sector how to improve thier efficiency. Swindells is not medically trained and has no experience of primary health care. But he wants to force GPs to take on work much of which they are not trained to do. And if they refuse? He will pass it down the food chain to the pharmacists.
Tribal, appointed as one of the Government's key advisers on healthcare spending, warned PCTs were 'remarkably tolerant' of variations in GP referral rates, and said a clampdown could bring 'very substantial benefits'. It also warned GP services could face 'rationalisation' if practices did not take on complex hospital work, with 'more cost-effective' providers such as pharmacists to be commissioned to take on a greater proportion of frontline work.
Don't you love the use of the word
"rationalisation"? And when the pharmacists make a mess of it, what then? Pass it down to the nurses? Then to the auxilliaries? Then to the cheapest and most ignorant of all the independent health care providers, the
"expert patients" If they could take over, the NHS would cost nothing.
Do not despair. There
are ways of making cuts. My colleague,
the Jobbing Doctor, shows how £350,000,000 could be saved at a stroke, and I am with him on that. I too have a simple ploy. A front end charge of £20 each and every time you wish to see a doctor. That charge would, at a stroke, reduce waste and would generate a vast amount of money. But it will not happen. Every time I suggest it, there are howls of anguish. Utterly wrong and utterly misplaced but demonstrating so clearly why no political party dare make the suggestion. Instead, they will stealthily dumb down the service. You can have three pharmacists for the price of one doctor (that figures - three years to train as a pharmacist, nine years to train as a GP).
You, the common folk, may continue to celebrate your "right" not to have to pay a front-end charge to see the new, stealthily dumbed-down, untrained, health care professional. But do not expect to find Gordon Brown, or Margaret Thatcher, or Patrician Hewitt, or Mark Swindells or Dr Crippen queuing behind you. We will all be elsewhere, seeing a doctor.
