I WRITE in anger at the waste I've just seen at a Gloucestershire LINk event last week, hosted at Naas Lane, Lydney.
This three year public outreach project has already spent (in 2008/09) £195k on achieving not a single change to policy, procedures or practices from any of the ideas in hand (those shown in its own report on pages 19/20). I know this as that is how their chairman answered that direct question at that very meeting.
In fact, LINk are halfway through their contract and have so far only achieved their sole obligation which is to serve an annual report to the Secretary of the Department of Health.
Now I ask your readers, do they want a pointless pot of public ideas, which has no guarantee of procuring any change in the delivery of healthcare, or do they want nine staff nurses? Or about one more GP?
I'm pretty confident some of those most commonly-raised ideas from the public would be for better out of hours services or more home calls, better care for the elderly or infirm after a stay in hospital etc. These are the things that frontline staff can do. Ignored ideas don't deliver services, staff do! But this project robs us of those very staff.
And remember this is a three year contract; that could mean £195k over three years, a spend of nearly £600k of Department of Health money that ought to be going to frontline services.
Now multiply that by the number of local authorities in England (152 I make it and assuming we work on an average of, say, £150K pa per authority) that's nearly £23million of NI-payers money!
Moreover, this waste is systematic.
In its recent report 'Putting Patients Last' the thinktank Civitas blames the monolithic nature of the NHS, arguing the 'customer' is in fact the target and data-obsessed Secretary of the Department of Health exactly as we see here with LINk.
Here's another example of how diversion of funds from frontline services and into management consultants and target-driven waste affects care at the sharp-end: recently the Care and Quality Commission released a report stating that 'less than half of all mental health patients feel safe in hospital wards' and, in fact, '16 per cent did not feel safe at all'. Sounds like not enough frontline staff to me.
More locally again, in the glossy mail-shot 'Health: your guide to local services', we learn that Gloucestershire NHS has bought from its sister organisation 2gether (the mental health foundation trust for Gloucestershire) Holly House. And we can only guess at what budget-busting commercial rate that property was acquired. Then there are the legal teams on each side given plenty of 'work' and whose staff, I'm certain, earn more than the average-grade staff nurse. Formerly, a joined-up National Health Service would've surely avoided all of this unnecessary cost. It's just more financial waste, diverting funds from delivering frontline services. Oh, and as an aside, this rather pointless infomercial even omitted St. Briavels surgery, denying our village's historical marking of the Forest by our 'hundred'!
As for our MP, Mark Harper, - shadow minister for disabilities, no less. He didn't even attend the event. Is ANYONE listening to LINk? In fact, I saw but one councillor; from St. Briavels, no less. – Yours, a fortunately and thankfully fit yet angry 38 year-old man. Grrrrrr