Wasteful class commissioning.

One of the terms we have not heard banded about for a while is world class commissioning (WCC). What is that you may ask and how does it affect my healthcare? A good question and the answer is it was a buzzword used by those who might have been close to the top of your school’s remedial classes in order to make them sound clever.

You would have thought that such intellectuals who were destined to run PCTs would have used their WCC skills to ensure that public money was well spent and maximize tax payers’ investment. Unfortunately they were not at the top of your average Northernshire comprehensive school’s remedial classes for those brighter than them will either be guests of her Majesty or rubbing their hands with greed for they could spell two 6 letter words a week, instead of the one 5 letter word a week needed to be a world class commissioner of healthcare, and they went into the private sector.

A small piece shows how well the WCC remedials have done in out foxing the private sector. If you cannot sleep well at night we suggest you download the full accounts from here but we do warn you if you are on a NHS N3 connection the massive size of the download (10Mb) could cripple your practice computer system for days.

Just look at the costs on these world class commissioned projects and in particular the weaselly words that describe world class crap. They are under the heading of 31 Losses and Special Payments and other Accounting notes p133 using Adobe reader (128 using account page numbers) and subdivided into the following headings:

Claims abandoned.

The National Decontamination Programme (was that ethnic cleansing or some other form of NHS cleansing for example ward cleaning does anyone know what it actually is?) has written off £ 1,125,841 on two schemes as neither was able to complete its procurement due to insolvency on the part of the preferred bidder.

Excellent even those just retarded enough to be involved in WCC don’t have enough fingers to work out the difference between positive and negative. No doubt their betters in their remedial class will know where the £ 1.25 million has gone or the money needed to run a 10000+ patient GP practice for a year has just gone puff the magic dragon into thin air.

Store losses.

Emergency Preparedness Stockpiles which we are sure that all GPs and hospital doctors will have ready access to in the event of “accidental or malicious release of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear agents.” This is an understandable mere £ 30,948,109. Anyone know where the current stock is kept just in case we need it?

Pandemic Flu Countermeasures Stockpile The department wrote-off £59 million in relation to counter measures held for the pan(ic)demic flu preparedness (another one for the bingo card) that have now passed their shelf life. An interesting phrase which could be translated as completely useless products.

Fruitless losses.

£ 8 million pay off to a private firm to terminate an ISTC contract. Seems a lot when the cost of ammunition to terminate international terrorist leaders is pence. Still someone will be laughing at the taxpayers’ expense and be assured that as this was at the request of NHS London which was responsible for the management of the contract there will have been plenty of WCC to account for this loss but not to make it good.

Constructive losses

E-learning for healthcare. Bet you knew nothing about this one but following a review of capital projects a decision was made not to allocate further capital to E-learning projects and 20 were cancelled at a loss of £ 6.1 million which cannot be recovered. We can think of plenty of other E-something projects that could do with going the same way.

Look at the recovery of loss recorded in 2009-10. A loss of £ 79.2 million in 2009-10 was reduced by £ 13.7 million because someone found the paperwork. Given that WCC is nothing more than paperwork how could someone not have the relevant paperwork for storage of anti flu drugs to the tune of £ 65.5 million?

There are plenty of other little bits to delight you in this 154 page document try p22(18) and see how much per head your region costs the tax payer, how much cars cost for certain senior doctors and managers p51(47), how much certain senior doctors and nurses got as salaries p53(49) and in pensions and lump sums p54(50) together with DoH expenditure to organizations which certain individuals have connections with p135(131).

Look at the end of the article to see how little politicians understand the health service that they, and they predecessors, have created and seek to improve using the Tripartite market model. The person quoted here is none other than health minister Simon Burns the italics are our additions:

“All these payments relate to contracts signed under Labour (we will do it so much better), who gave the private sector preferential treatment in the NHS (so we won’t of course do that just any willing provider). The contracts were overpriced and the delivery often inadequate.

Our Health and Social Care Bill introduces safeguards that will stop (encourage) this, whilst ensuring that patients are given the best (most expensive) choice of a wide (more limited) range of (privately provided) services (completely similar to the ISTC contracts but with different names).”

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that in the United Kingdom no-one is too thick to fail as there is always NHS management. You cannot fail there either for gross incompetence is always rewarded with success albeit it at the penalty of a sideward promotion and a healthy pension.

And there is more of the same coming our way very soon.