The Party is dead, long live the Party(s)?

This evening, here in Northernshire, as the sun came to set, news has arrived by carrier pigeon that our unelected Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has finally resigned. For the best part of a week patients have all said the same thing “I voted to get rid of him why hasn’t he gone?”

We here at ND Central do, of course, live in the incredibly affluent parts of Northernshire where all NHS managers have Harvard or Yale MBAs, most of our patients drive Range Rover Sports, and all GPs and our staff drive Ferraris so we do have to admit to a slight cultural bias compared with the rest of the country in the patients we see and treat.

For a lot of people a change is said to be as good as rest. For those in healthcare both in hospitals, and in General Practice we have had so much change we should be unconscious. Unfortunately we are not. We, and our staff, daily live the nightmare of 13 years of change mostly for the worse.

Still we have now one healthcare certainty for we are now in the foothills of healthcare uncertainty. The climb will get steeper as change is coming as a new Government always equals change or “reform”. The pack will get ever heavier as more change will be piled on our backs and the rewards will get ever thinner as “efficiency savings” and initiatives will sprout like nettles.

We are in a recession while the population ages and illness enjoys a year on year growth without any check as we cannot yet turn the clocks back. Politicians will feed patient expectation to distract from their shortcomings as fiddling with healthcare is always an easy target for them. Healthcare costs will rise as treatment improves but until the economy is sorted there will be less resources.

Praise be to the old Party for never in the history of British healthcare has so much been spent and mismanaged by so few to deliver so little to so many but so much to a select few.

To the new Party(s) we would say: ask not what the healthcare budget can do for managers and political ideology, instead, ask what can the healthcare budget do for real patients’ healthcare?

We await your orders, Sirs.