Good stuff

Tick these off, good stuff or not?

1. Create jobs around the green and carbon reduction agenda. This is beyond urgent.
2. Railways are now, mostly in public ownership. Has privatisation actually delivered better services; cleaner water, cheaper fuel, better postal services, newer infrastructure? Is some sort of revised public ownership overdue?
3. One thing Covid taught us, reliable full-fibre-broadband isn’t a luxury, it’s a national utility.
4. Food-banks are a fabulous act of charity. The fact we need them is a national disgrace. We must crank-up the living wage. Start at a tenner and head for £15ph.
5. Bring back Sure-Start; giving kids and families the foundation they need.
6. Build back basic dentistry services, look again at prescription charges and set up a National Care Service along side the NHS.
7. Review our relationship with the EU, particularly in regard to energy policy. 

Just seven things that I think most people would have a sympathetic view about… 

.. an opinion, at least. Things that need a bit of a sort-out, based on my observations of life, services, conversations, day-dreaming and good stuff.

… this is the tricky bit. 

This good stuff is also based on something else… a document called; ‘For the many, not the few’… Jeremy Corbin’s 2019 election manifesto.

Tricky, eh? 

If I’ve proved anything, it’s probably, ideology is an impediment in politics. 

In the late 18th century Methodists began setting hymns to popular tunes.

More mainstream religious believers thought, popular music shouldn’t be heard in church.

The notion that dance music was ‘the Devil’s music’ was widely held. Hence the expression, the ‘Devil has all the best tunes’. 

He doesn’t… neither does he have all the worst policies.

An open mind, opens-up possibilities. As Disraeli said; ‘doing the greatest good, for the greatest number‘.

As much as Trusts are in a tangle with waiting and workforce, social care is disappearing and goodness knows what else there is to worry about, our big anxiety has to be around the future of primary care.

A look in the rear view mirror will tell you, I’ve written about this, endlessly. 

Now, the pressures of inflation, fuel costs, unfunded pay increases, demand and the shortage of doctors could see GPs go the way of dentists.

On-line digital healthcare provider, Livi is offering GPs +£90,000, to work hours that suit, on line, from home, no bureaucracy and no aggravation from NHSE, all the kit and training, free.

Why would you be a GP partner? It makes no sense.

I know, not every patient is right for a video-consult and GPs are delivering record numbers of face-to-face consultations. 

But…

… GPs per patient in England dropped by 2.2% in the year to July 2022 as the workforce shrank and patient numbers grew… whilst practices, somehow, busted a gut, delivering 26m appointments, in July, alone.

This is untenable. The quicker we realise radical action is needed, the sooner we’ll fix it.

Digital consultations create headroom to look after, more thoroughly, the patients for whom it is not right… and the patients who use digital, love it. 

The NHS Long-Term Plan envisions a digital first NHS, primary care and outpatients. It’s time for NHSE to stop Pritcharding-about, roll-up its selves and make it happened. 

Time for a National Digital Primary Care Service. Take the load off practices.

How?

Take a deep breath;

Online, digital provider, Babylon, wants to pull out of the NHS as losses are damaging their US share price. 

NHSE could… 

… sue them for breach of contract, good faith, damages and anything else we can think of…

… or

…nationalise them. 

Their AI offering still has a question mark over it but linked to NHS’s data base, carefully curated and developed, would be world leading.

Use their infrastructure, connect it to GP networks and you have NHS Digital doing something useful, a system up and running and created a baseline.

Bold, innovative, unconventional, precipitous, reckless and… or what? Watch primary care shrivel on the vine. 

Machiavellian, cunning, devious, devilish? 

There’s a German proverb; “Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”, translated;

‘God is in the detail’. 

Let’s do some godly-good stuff!

News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.