New Mandate from NHS

Continue to lead the NHS’s response to Covid-19.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t it the NHS’s job to provide our health service?  So isn’t the NHS the service that should respond to pandemics, etc?  Or have I got this wrong?

Reading on, it repeats more lunacy, so I gave up,  Read it for yourself  Here it is.

But, to save you the trouble… in the words of my favourite NHS guru “it’s codswallop and obviously the whole concept is past its sell-by date., repeating woolly, objectives, etc”.  Well done, that man!

Hapless Hancock  (Minister for Health) promises he  “is going to continue to lead the NHS response to Covid’…”. Surely that’s his job?  Who else will do it?  Come to think of it,   B&Q, Amazon or just about anyone would do better, so perhaps that’s not such a bad idea.

The Manifesto goes on in the same vein – but I am sure you get the message.  One good thing….  ‘they’ seem to realise that we can no longer be fed the manta “NHS is best in the world’.  The penny has dropped, after last year’s shambles, and there is reality that we have to do far, far more to improve.

Jeremy Clarkson must have become bored during Lockdown, so as he wrote his usual column in The Sunday Times. he didn’t pull any punches,

This time it was the NHS he commented on,  Calling it “useless” and “a big, stupid, expensive monster”, he didn’t pull any punches when he pointed out it was no use clapping for the NHS, but that we should appreciate the staff – doctors, nurses, etc. – who had carried the can.

When people started to “Clap for the NHS” I did ask some “Why?”  But they were so full of euphoria they couldn’t step back to ask what would the claps gain?  A year on, and nurses have seen the gain:  a derisory 1% pay rise.

So perhaps, instead of this pathetic offer, the Dept. Health could really save money, stop issuing ridiculous Mandates, and with the money saved manage to pay Junior NHS staff a better wage.

Reputed to have spent £40,000 on buying a Lamborghini Tractor (apparently, they started out making tractors, until old man Lambo got fed up with Ferrari, and for the rest you must ask a petrolhead), this money is Clarkson’s to do what he likes with it.

Unlike the Dept. Health, who blithely spends our millions on its crackpot schemes.

My heart sank when I read on to the bit in the Manifesto “maintain and improve information sharing’.  I seem to recall that the NHS hasn’t been notable for IT recently – and T & T didn’t cover itself in glory.

As NHS commentator Roy Lilly says ” information is not data and sharing information data is next to impossible without sorting out GDPR and the Caldecott cat’s cradle, once and for all and for HMG to mandate system interoperability… and anyway, a lot of sensible people are already making sensible use of data”.

Then, like me, he asks “I wonder who wrote this? A single person, in jogging bottoms, with the laptop on the ironing board? A Zoom committee, ha”