Stephen Hodgson

Archive for August, 2009

I’ve just returned from a two week break in the US so I got a bit of headstart on the healthcare debate which has recently crossed the Atlantic. American politics and media is dominated by the debate about Obama’s healthcare plans and Americans are naturally looking to other countries to see what a government-directed healthcare system might look like if implemented in the US.

Whilst I was in the US I met Dan Hannan MEP who was there to speak to American politicians and the American people about how the NHS works and how a government-run healthcare system might operate in the US. I’m a fan of Dan Hannan: he is principled and he’s not afraid to express his views – two key qualities for any politician or leader.

It worries me that individuals can be vilified, it seems, for merely suggesting there might be anything wrong with the NHS. The NHS is a bureaucratic and hugely wasteful organisation and it has suffered dramatically under this Labour government, with its obsession with targets and top-down control (the worst recent example being the appalling situation in Mid Staffordshire). I’m grateful we have high profile politicians like Dan Hannan that promote the need for radical changes to healthcare in the UK despite the obvious media and party political pressure to conform to the view that the NHS is fundamentally a good way to provide healthcare in a prosperous democratic country (it isn’t).

In Loughborough, the bureaucratic top-down management of the NHS and its negative effects on healthcare are all too apparent in the plans to relocate the Loughborough NHS Walk In Centre from Pinfold Gate, in the centre of the town, to Epinal Way – more than a mile from the town centre. Most people I’ve spoken to about the move think it is a bad idea – it will make it more difficult for people to get to the Walk In Centre, and, because of its new location on Epinal Way, the Walk In Centre will effectively become a Drive In Centre.

The way the NHS is organised right now means that it serves bureaucrats and politicians first, patients second. Thankfully in Loughborough prospective Conservative MP Nicky Morgan and borough councillor Pauline Ranson have been leading a campaign for over a year now to highlight the problems with the move of the NHS Walk In Centre. The local NHS is now running yet another consultation on the planned move which I urge Loughborough residents to respond to – details are on Nicky Morgan’s website or directly from the NHS website (scroll down to ‘Questionnaire on transport in Loughborough and Hinckley’).

Users of the Walk In Centre (and I count myself amongst them) know first hand that NHS decisions are taken by bureaucrats and politicians and that the NHS’s top-down management is inherently costly and detached from patient care. Those are just a few things that are wrong with the NHS.