Rabbit’s foot

It’s Monday, just coming up to half-twelve and I’ve got Sky News on the telly. 

Andrew Stevenson, few of us will have heard of him, is taking to a stage, bathed in blue light, at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, London. 

He tells the audience; hustings involved 2,000 members of the Tory Party. There was a hush and a titter. 

He quickly corrected himself… he meant 20,000. Cue laughter.

He likes numbers. He told us, this dreary process took 214 hrs of interviews and involved 600 questions. He appealed for party unity. 

Used the word outstanding, quite a lot.

Sir Graham Brady, chief Tory grey suit, stepped up. He did a dreary recap, thanking a lot of people no one has heard of. 

Outstanding, he said… there was that word again.

Finally, he got to the point.

About seventeen and a half thousand people we’ve never heard of, have chosen the new PM. Not for the first time. It’s the third time they’ve done it. 

They’re running out of options. 

Sky’s Adam Bolton said, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. He’s not wrong…

…it was Lizzie… with 57% of the vote. 

She arrived at the lectern, with the bashful smile of a head girl on speech day. 

She said BoJo was outstanding… 

… awkward silence in the hall. The audience didn’t seem to know whether to clap or not. A little riffle started and they all joined in.

That was it. A new PM has been dumped on us.

A Sky-You-Gov poll asked the public, ‘How would Lizzie be as PM? 52% said ‘terrible’. Sixty five percent thought she was ‘out-of-touch’.

They also asked the public what they thought her priorities are.

• 74% Cost of living
• 47% Economy
• 28% Environment
• 20% Immigration

It looks like YouGov chose young healthy people for the pole? 

It’s impossible to verify, the ‘mechanicals.’ Who, how many, when and was it all on the phone. I find it puzzling the NHS was not on the list.

In another poll, in the London Evening Standard, Ipsos say 51% want a general election.

We wait for news of my 21st secretary of state for health.

Thérèse Coffey is in the frame. Perhaps, former vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi? 

Whoever it is, here’s some advice; you can’t ‘fix the NHS’. You can help the NHS. You can get-off-its-back and support it. Given time and space, it’ll fix itself. 

All you can do is help it back on its feet and hope waiting times come down before the next election.

All things being even, given that the current Parliament first met on Tuesday 17 December 2019, it will automatically dissolve on Tuesday 17 December 2024. 

Polling day would then be 25 days later, and should be held, no later than Tuesday 24 January 2025. Usually elections are on a Thursday so it might be 20th. 

But…

… no one wants an election in January, in the middle of an NHS winter crisis.

My money is on an earlier election, maybe even 29th September 2023… that means 382 days to ‘fix the NHS’.

How do you do that?

• First, social care. Strip out inflation and you’ll see, social care spending has actually dropped. The much vaunted cap on care costs, is about protecting people’s assets, not getting more money into the system. 

• You have to take on the supermarkets and others, for the unskilled Labour market. Create a social-care-living-wage at £15ph. Pay Trusts to run training courses. They have the premisses and skills.

• Create a career pathway for nurses that doesn’t start in university. Give the money to the Trusts and let them organise themselves. The apprentice scheme penalises the Trusts for the placement costs but earn-to-learn could be more popular. Combine academic and work-based learning. 

• Doctors? Do what Milton Keynes FT is doing. 

• Make best use of the Better Care Fund to accelerate safe discharge. Hosptial in-reach teams for the first six weeks, giving social care more time to get organised.

• Accelerate a digital first primary care, allowing GPs to spend more time on complex and digitally disadvantaged patients.

• Hubs will help get elective waits down but remember they need to be staffed, too.

… then get onto Amazon.

Buy a mid-year wall planner and count-down the days to the election…

… and while yer there, buy a lucky rabbit’s foot. 

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.