NHS Rant

Dr Rant gathers the views of a team of doctors at his site. He and his team have prepared a manifesto-style post on what should be done with the NHS. As someone who is interested in how taxpayer's money is spent, I was particularly interested in the things that Dr Rant says the NHS should stop. I don't know whether the list is in any order, but it's worth reviewing.

-Patsy Hewitt
-Tony Blair
-Gordon Brown
-Andy Burnham
-Liam Bryne
-Lord Hunt
-Sir Liam Donaldson
-Spin doctors being preferred to medical doctors.
-Wasting money on PFI
-Wasting money on management consultants
-Wasting money on managers
-Wasting money on redisorganisations
-Wasting money on computer projects
-Wasting money on useless wheezes such as walk in centres, "">independent sector treatment centres
-Wasting money on stillborn administrative idiocies
such as practice based commissioning and payment by results (which are arcane concepts, even to their authors.)
-Wasting money on useless ideas such as “choice” and “choose and book”
-Wasting money on NHS direct
-Wasting money pandering to the “worried well” rather than those who are sick
-Wasting money on clinical governance
-Wasting money on arm’s length QUANGOS such as NICE and NPSA and the modernisation agency
-Wasting money on unused and unwanted “guidelines”
-Wasting money paying out negligence claims
-Wasting money and peoples’ lives in useless schemes such as MMC and MTAS
-Wasting money training midwives and physiotherapists for no jobs at the end of their courses
-Wasting money on non jobs such as “five a day eating co-ordinators”
-Wasting time on meetings that reduce hours to minutes, and their participants to tears.
-Listening to people who pretend to know something about healthcare but actually don't
-specifically Alan Maynard, Julian Le Grande, Paul Corrigan, Simon Stevens, Alan Milburn, Lord Warner, and the false expertise of spinmeister management consultants.
-Pretending that it can deliver all healthcare to all people
-Pretending that patients can have whatever they want
-Pretending that the NHS is in any way "patient centred" or "patient focused" (It isn’t, never will be, and never should be for reasons I’ll demonstrate in a future rant)
-Dealing with well people.

The rest of the post is also worth a read. When you look at the problems in the NHS/Rant's manifesto it's hard to know where to start.