He seems to be actively dangerous on a few fronts as well. The blanket implementation of Cass for example is doing a massive amount of damage to a very vulnerable minority.
Difficult to underestimate the damage that Lansley did.
Not surprising that the last of his structure is being dismantled
He didnāt quite get to sell off the NHS but he did inspire this
If be happy if they could; get consultants in the same hospital to talk to eachother, let alone across 3 hospitals in the same trust, introduce at first appointment a cancer advocate and also introduce a central booking tool for scans across three hospitals. But no, only sexy large projects get a focus.
Even better if they could get consultants in one speciality to treat patients who need their expertise, despite the patients officially being the responsibility of a consultant with completely different specialist skills.
If youāre being treated for one condition and you develop a life-threatening complication of a different type then the consultant who has the skills to sort that out can refuse to do so because, essentially, āThe patient is not my patientā. And you can die from that.
Guess how I know this.
That would be great just as long as the cancer advocate was issued with the managerial equivalent of a pick-axe handle (or maybe an actual pick-axe handle).
Hospitals could and should be doing the internal joining up of clinical and administrative dots.
The wider and bigger problem for the NHS is an approx Ā£6bn annual deficit, and so that in part is what the NHSE abolishment is about in both financial terms but also signalling whatās to come.
Yeah, but the standard government approach to any underfunded service is to faff around with structures so it looks like they are doing something (hello from education).
Yep, that whole consultant thing is a shit show. We had to go back to the GP twice to force a change of consultant. But hey, what difference does a few weeks make on a time sensative illness eh. Really doth my piss make boil.
I get that, unfortunately too many hospitals and trusts dont do the basics, much of it driven by the need to meet meaningless central metrics. A classic being the 60 or so days from diagnosis to treatment for cancer. The pre diagnosis bit can take longer and no one gives a shit.
The strategic stuff, that will always change and i would expect those at the top to be able to managing that ( yea, I know!).
But when you hold shite metrics to be the measure of patient outcome, i just dont understand that.
My letters of observation were sent, felt like shouting at the moon tbh.
The medical care, once received, was excellent. When i spoke to the medical staff, they were as equally frustrated and their view of some consultants is shocking.
Watched him on LK this morning and he was an utter self absorbed twat who just kept droning on about how great he is.
Someone in authority must have said 2 months and the NHS wrote that down as 62 days. Legitimate if youāre diagnosed in July or December. False for the other 10 months.
Claireās first treatment was her surgery. That took place on ⦠you guessed it ⦠Day 62.
Not, I suspect, a coincidence.
As is some consultantsā view of other consultants (strictly speaking groups of consultants - they hang together in packs, each under a Clinical Lead). The specific attention Claire needed was called for independently from at least three different directions. Maybe four, including one outside the Trust and one we paid for privately. The people doing the calling copied their calls to me and one of them also copied the miserable refusal which boiled down to āIt seems this lady has cancer. I suspect that the cancer might be causing the very serious symptom [which is my speciality]. I recommend you cure the cancer. If the symptom persists after that please let me knowā. By this stage the cancer was all but incurable.
I feel you, I really do. Iāve spent 15 or so years in the middle of my career battling and learning how to out-manoeuvre consultants. The instrument to control them is there (their consultant job plan, effectively a contract made up of PAs (Planned Activities)) but too often hospital managers donāt know or donāt have the appetite to grip this as tightly as they should and Medical Directors know better than to upset their colleagues lest they rejoin them once their spell on the board comes to an end. Add to the that the fact that consultants have the power to vote a Chief Executive off the board and its not hard to see how they effectively go about without fear and do as they please.
The problem of medical specialty silos is particularly egregious - consultants know full well that a patients care often needs cross specialty consultation, and the need is always the most acute when patients are at greatest risk. Time and again Iāve had groups of them bemoan this problem as if it is somehow outside of their own ability to resolve it.
Cancer care is the best example and the one Iām currently most involved with in terms of trying to get and keep patients on tricky anti-cancer drugs which have unpredictable and very serious side effect profiles - which of course requires the ocologist and another 'ologists to discuss the patient and agree on the management and often prescribing etc, and yet they still complain that this relies on having some kind of personal relationship with who-ever is on the rota⦠You couldnāt make it up
Kick that can into the scorched grass
Foreign Office: The interfering busybody has only managed to get that nurse out of prison in Qumran.
Sir Humphrey: But you told the Prime Minister that was impossible.
Foreign Office: If it had been left to the Foreign Office it would have been impossible !
(I may have paraphrased a bit.)
Conservative ? Republican ? Surprise ?
How depressingly predictable, but just another authoritarian leader getting things done
Itās a bit lost in the body but the fact that Istanbul University also rescinded his degree a day before the arrest was also quite blatant, as itās required to be able to run for President in Turkey.