Re: The seven year wait: Northern Ireland’s disintegrating secondary care services
Dear Editor
"Reform" has been continually cited over decades as the solution to a serially underfunded NHS and Social Care system.
The NHS has continually endured these reforms, whilst waiting lists have inexorably lengthened.
McKinsey model solutions - stratification of care and pathways, further reductions in hospital capacity, downskilling of staff, outsourcing and privatisation of services, increasing restrictions to accessing care - have all been implemented in spades over the last decade or more.
But guess what: the problem has worsened to a now really quite dangerous degree.
"Reform" can no longer be seen as a credible solution, unless it is a reversal of the above reforms.
With erstwhile support for the system we once had, with uprated funding (vs OECD) and professional leadership, the NHS would be top of the table in all outcomes.
Consolidation is a corporate solution, not a medical one. It depends on cuts and it invariably reduces access and quality of end-users' experiences.
Why not see spare capacity as essential; as a huge asset, and as having potential for future planning with built-in flexibility?
Looking at some reforms we already have witnessed, social care reform (privatisation) has undeniably been a massive and worsening disaster. Not even a nod to this brazen failure of policy by reform champions.
Without the basics in place (beds, staff, resources), the rest is just more unpalatable hubris.
The NHS never was "unsustainable", but the lie that ever more 'reform' is the solution somehow prevails.
Rapid Response:
Re: The seven year wait: Northern Ireland’s disintegrating secondary care services
Dear Editor
"Reform" has been continually cited over decades as the solution to a serially underfunded NHS and Social Care system.
The NHS has continually endured these reforms, whilst waiting lists have inexorably lengthened.
McKinsey model solutions - stratification of care and pathways, further reductions in hospital capacity, downskilling of staff, outsourcing and privatisation of services, increasing restrictions to accessing care - have all been implemented in spades over the last decade or more.
But guess what: the problem has worsened to a now really quite dangerous degree.
"Reform" can no longer be seen as a credible solution, unless it is a reversal of the above reforms.
With erstwhile support for the system we once had, with uprated funding (vs OECD) and professional leadership, the NHS would be top of the table in all outcomes.
Consolidation is a corporate solution, not a medical one. It depends on cuts and it invariably reduces access and quality of end-users' experiences.
Why not see spare capacity as essential; as a huge asset, and as having potential for future planning with built-in flexibility?
Looking at some reforms we already have witnessed, social care reform (privatisation) has undeniably been a massive and worsening disaster. Not even a nod to this brazen failure of policy by reform champions.
Without the basics in place (beds, staff, resources), the rest is just more unpalatable hubris.
The NHS never was "unsustainable", but the lie that ever more 'reform' is the solution somehow prevails.
Competing interests: No competing interests