Exclusive (not)! The Party is now giving the Comrade Patient extra Choice. Read all about!

Being up early to do an early Brown shift (remember the f ?) one of the team cast an early morning view over the UK medical blogs and found a couple of pieces that have appeared in the last few hours. They concern an article in the uk medical magazine called Pulse and the bloggers are the Jobbing Doctor and the Cockroach Catcher who put there own take on the original article which is here.

How busy the little comrade managers have been. We like their comments scattered around the original article like “maximise the capacity of our commissioning” = we have not cocked up guv and “robust conversations with GPs” = someone thick bullying GPs to get them out of something brown and sticky they got themselves into because they are thick and, finally the coup de grace, “It is incumbent on them as part of their registration with the GMC to use resources efficiently”.

Must have missed that bit we always thought it was to do the best for our patients which usually means ignoring managers as they only think how to do things cheaply for their patients (or do they have clients?). And guess who isn’t responsible “we have had very input in”. The only following orders clause. Read the paragraph yourself as it is fine Party speak.

It put in mind a plan that was proposed by a group of one the local Thickerrazis in our part of the world whereby GPs were going to get referral “targets” from the local idiot managers some of whom may just be able to give each of the fingers on their hands an individual number but they can’t do the same for their toes as they were always in the lowest of the sets for mathematics at school.

The plan went something along these lines. If you refer to target you get paid. If you go over the target you don’t get paid. If you do better than target you get paid more.

Now we know the Party are good at predicting illness and how it occurs in a population as the brightest idiots, those at the Department of Health, were spot on with their predictions for the Swine Flu Pandemic in the best prepared (laughed at?) country in the world for flu.

So the local idiots will be so much better at disease predictions as they are dealing with a smaller population whom they know so well from their daily dealings with their spreadsheets. Can you imagine this conversation as a result:

GP: “Comrade Commissar Chief Executive I think you may have an ulcer due to the stress of you daily marshalling your troops in the Great Patriotic war against the imperialist GP scum and I would like to refer you for an endoscopy . . .”

Comrade Commissar: “Make it so and fast as you would for any comrade patient, comrade doctor, as I am late for meeting on boosting hamster production to reduce health inequalites and improve equitable access!”

GP: “. . but Comrade Commissar if I refer you then I will not meet my target your under commissars have set me on your instruction and I would lose my 5 roubles a year bonus so I have to reject your illness request.”?

Neither can we but it seems that there are those who can and are actively trying to do so down in some of the southern shires of Northernshire.

Praise be to the Party for “socialized medicine” in the UK. Is “socialized” being corrupted now into “Soviet” style choice? Or are our early morning thought processes a little addled?

Things will only get better, won’t they?