To Stop the NHS from collapse ... when it already has

 Hi All, 

The real rationale for lockdowns is that we have to stop the NHS from collapse at all costs: none one wants to see hospitals overwhelmed with patients and people being left on trollies to die. Why would be get into this in the first place? Because the  NHS is actually like a old Soviet Style industry in that it can do outputs (production), but doesn't respond to inputs (response to patients) : the Soviet bloc might have been able to produce a million tractors a year, but it couldn't cope with the fact people didn't need or want that many tractors, but might have wanted loo roll or jeans instead . Likewise the NHS is good when it is in full 'command economy' mode as we see when it was tasks with the vaccine rollouts, but bad in coping when patients come to them for treatment on an individual level.

Where the NHS is less good at is the input from the patient  side or the consumer if you like : if you are lucky to get an ambulance in time (and the call centres get drunks calling up demanding ambulances to take them home as they don't want to pay taxi fares)  you might survive a heart attack . But beyond this 'emergency' treatment it is appalling at follow up care. A friend of mine, his father had multiple heart attacks during the pandemic, was taken to A&E department, kept overnight and discharged on multiple occasions . To cut a long story short he was supposed to have stents and then pacemaker fitted (which also came with a monitoring set). Because of covid it took over a year and more heart attacks  for these operations to be done. 

Thus in order to 'cope' with covid and even with a lockdown in force, the NHS itself was forced into a lockdown. From friends who work in the NHS it went like this : GP's just went to ground and were MIA, in hospitals they were cancelling most of what they actually does on a day to day basis and more . It allowed its managers and secretarial staff to go and 'work from home' and where it actually needed help was in the form of 'health care assistants' or nurses as they used to be known in the twentieth century,  before it was decided to try and elevate  nurses into cheaper variants of Doctors. When they did  redeployed staff  from other services which were shut down, it was as healthcare assistants, who had to suffer under the nurses whilst their own services were in effect closed. I think though, the fertility and abortion departments were allowed to remain open. 

When it came to the spring and summer, all of a sudden the directive went out to reopen these 'non essential' services aka 95% of the NHS and because they'd been closed down for so long, a massive backlog was created which like the production of loo roll in the Soviet Union was suddenly a priority because the papers were now picking up on the fact that people were dying of non covid stuff too and that could have been prevented. 

Thankfully that was last year and this year people say to me that shutting down the NHS as it was last year isn't the way they are going to do things, the vaccine and booster jabs have helped in that respect . But to my mind, it seems that the NHS wasn't actually 'saved' by a lockdown because it was already collapsed, for the only way it did survive was to recast itself as a covid health service. 

Now the left will want to throw more money at the NHS. The right will talk about 'reform'. Neither approach will work. Throwing money at a Soviet style industry won't make things better. The right wing view of 'reform' is not privatisation, but something worse which is outsourcing, wherein more and more parts of the NHS are contracted out to private companies for them to make a nice juicy profit, but at taxpayer's expense and not out of their own efforts. For example patient transport is outsourced to private companies as are things like cleaning and maintenance.. the same thing happens in local government and of course railways . The stories I've heard about how these  contractors totally rip off the public purse and no-one does anything about it is unbelievable and it is one of the worse aspects of libertarian conservative dogma. In fact none of this is actually libertarian or conservatism, but crony rentier corporatism.