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God Bless the NHS
The National Health Service, Britain's only 'national religion', has never been more popular. Last year, the Office of National Statistics reported higher public satisfaction with the NHS than at any time since its foundation. Politicians can hardly be surprised then, when their plans to reform are met with public dismay and professional fury.
This year has seen one of the most bruising political battles ever fought over the future of the NHS. The twenty-two month fight to push the NHS and Social Care Act through parliament prompted the most widespread political campaign by doctors since Aneurin Bevan established the NHS in 1948. It cost the coalition government dearly and shredded the reputation of the Secretary of State for Health.
So why did they do it? Roger Taylor examines the ideology behind the current reforms and the reasons why the government decided to take on the nation's most treasured institution. God Bless the NHS is a balanced take on those who support and oppose the new system, and at the patchy history of attempts to reform the NHS and the likelihood of the success this time round. Finally, it addresses the political failure at the heart of the problem and the inevitable conflict when politics and medicine mix.
This year has seen one of the most bruising political battles ever fought over the future of the NHS. The twenty-two month fight to push the NHS and Social Care Act through parliament prompted the most widespread political campaign by doctors since Aneurin Bevan established the NHS in 1948. It cost the coalition government dearly and shredded the reputation of the Secretary of State for Health.
So why did they do it? Roger Taylor examines the ideology behind the current reforms and the reasons why the government decided to take on the nation's most treasured institution. God Bless the NHS is a balanced take on those who support and oppose the new system, and at the patchy history of attempts to reform the NHS and the likelihood of the success this time round. Finally, it addresses the political failure at the heart of the problem and the inevitable conflict when politics and medicine mix.
336 pages, Paperback
First published March 7, 2013
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About the author
Roger Taylor
78 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 23, 2013
If you knew nothing about the NHS and someone handed you this book to read you would believe that the NHS was some vast psychopathic entity designed to kill and maim people at vast public expense from which the people live in fear. Indeed, this book could have been written by any one of a number of people who have a vested interest in seeing the NHS cut up and hived off to the highest bidder and it reads like a Layman’s terms version of the government’s Health and Social Care Bill. The vested interest in actual question is Roger Taylor who happens to be one of the founding members of Doctor Foster, a privately run, for profit company which makes money from measuring performances of various aspects of the NHS – monitoring the competitive nature our health service in essence, for a lot of money. Needless to say, in the advent of full privatisation and full competition in health provision Doctor Foster’s profits would soar through the roof as not only health professionals and policy makers would be in need of their data but so would every one of us. Roger Taylor stands to make an absolute fortune from NHS privatisation so it should come as no surprise that his book is heavily skewed towards this narrative; don’t be misled by the title, the title is a satire on how the public foolishly view the NHS. His argument it that we’re more satisfied with it than ever, but shouldn’t be and his only solution is continued increasing involvement of the private sector which he refers to as the “independent sector” throughout. Always beware of people using this term, it shows they are intelligent enough to know privatisation is bad so they alter the semantics of the debate rather than the debate itself.
Roger Taylor is also a journalist, for the Guardian no less who are also the publisher of this volume which goes to show how wide-spread the pernicious interest in NHS privatisation has spread. As a journalist his chapters follow a thematic and well-trod road of human interest / human tragedy / blame / repercussion / solution and remarkably his solution is always that same one. As though private health care is some kind of panacea for institutional failings. I don’t think anyone who disagrees with the premise of this book would argue that the NHS was perfect. Privateers often cite data, probably from Doctor Foster, that shows we lag behind other nations in Europe who have an insurance based system – Taylor does it throughout the book. What he, and other critics fail to mention, is that the gap is closing after the huge investment of the 1997-2010 Labour years, and with continued investment it would continue to close. The base level for these statistics of so called failings is only a few years previous, but if you take the chronic under-investment of the Tory governments of Thatcher and Major you see why we have traditionally done worse than our European partners, but it must be said significantly better than our American peers. Let it not be forgotten that infant mortality chronic disease care etc is much better also in Cuba than the UK where there is no private involvement whatsoever but privateers simply never point to the Cuban model of healthcare as an example to take ideas from. The reason for this is that the privateers aren’t involved in the debate for the good of the population but to line their own pockets. Selling out to the energy companies, the rail companies, the water companies etc etc was all supposed to be good for the “consumer” but we know better now, and beware anyone referring to patients as consumers.
As with all NHS critics the Mid-Staffs scandal features prominently in this book and is used as a stick with which to beat whole swathes of the service and even hypothesises that Mid-Staffs is the first of many scandals waiting to come out. If Roger Taylor has evidence to suggest this then he should bring it to light to the authorities instead of throwing speculation about. One area where criticism is justified of the NHS is its whistleblowing procedure, or rather the following of the whistleblowing procedure. In some hospitals the service is difficult to critique and doctors / managers see such things as personal attacks so hush things up rather than doing something about them at the earliest opportunity. Private Eye have covered this extensively and uncovered some truly worrying evidence of cover ups and court silencing behaviours across the NHS. Two things are needed to address this – an altering of the culture of secrecy in all public services, not just the NHS, but specifically for the NHS to be taken out of government control and handed to an independent, public sector body free of government interference with all the relevant powers of oversight and decision making capability. The government sets the budget but this commission, perhaps, makes the decisions. This will end the political blame culture that pervades every area of the public sector. We never look for ways to stop things happening, we look for people to sack when they finally go wrong. This is entirely reactive and unhelpful. On a similar line because so much money is spent on healthcare each new government wants to put its own stamp on the health service so you get change after change after change – no actual change is given chance to bed down to see if it works. The politics of the NHS is one of the things that may just kill the NHS – every government of the day wants to give it another heart transplant when the one it had might have been working fine, or at least getting better as time wore on. Roger Taylor’s solution to this genuine concern is, yes you guessed it, more private involvement.
At no stage does Taylor provide a coherent analysis of why bringing in a layer of shareholding profit makers would improve the health service. There are some interesting ideas of patient involvement in care, though the extent of this is somewhat worrying and seems to be just a way of removing liability for care, good or bad, from the would-be private institutions and onto the individual which strikes me as libertarianism gone mad. The NHS is not failing, it is improving. Some things need to improve quicker than they are doing but cutting funding in real terms and involving Richard Branson isn’t going to make anything better, it will make them worse. I accuse the author of writing a book purely to further his own private interests in making money out of the NHS and shamefully couching his argument in terms of patient care. I accuse the Guardian of aiding and abetting this miserable little tome for similar reasons – the Guardian Trust is no stranger to investing in odd ventures against the interests of the type of people who read their paper. God Bless the NHS is essentially literary cheerleading for the likes of Jeremy Hunt and Andrew Lansley before him, two men with whom the NHS should never have been trusted.
Roger Taylor is also a journalist, for the Guardian no less who are also the publisher of this volume which goes to show how wide-spread the pernicious interest in NHS privatisation has spread. As a journalist his chapters follow a thematic and well-trod road of human interest / human tragedy / blame / repercussion / solution and remarkably his solution is always that same one. As though private health care is some kind of panacea for institutional failings. I don’t think anyone who disagrees with the premise of this book would argue that the NHS was perfect. Privateers often cite data, probably from Doctor Foster, that shows we lag behind other nations in Europe who have an insurance based system – Taylor does it throughout the book. What he, and other critics fail to mention, is that the gap is closing after the huge investment of the 1997-2010 Labour years, and with continued investment it would continue to close. The base level for these statistics of so called failings is only a few years previous, but if you take the chronic under-investment of the Tory governments of Thatcher and Major you see why we have traditionally done worse than our European partners, but it must be said significantly better than our American peers. Let it not be forgotten that infant mortality chronic disease care etc is much better also in Cuba than the UK where there is no private involvement whatsoever but privateers simply never point to the Cuban model of healthcare as an example to take ideas from. The reason for this is that the privateers aren’t involved in the debate for the good of the population but to line their own pockets. Selling out to the energy companies, the rail companies, the water companies etc etc was all supposed to be good for the “consumer” but we know better now, and beware anyone referring to patients as consumers.
As with all NHS critics the Mid-Staffs scandal features prominently in this book and is used as a stick with which to beat whole swathes of the service and even hypothesises that Mid-Staffs is the first of many scandals waiting to come out. If Roger Taylor has evidence to suggest this then he should bring it to light to the authorities instead of throwing speculation about. One area where criticism is justified of the NHS is its whistleblowing procedure, or rather the following of the whistleblowing procedure. In some hospitals the service is difficult to critique and doctors / managers see such things as personal attacks so hush things up rather than doing something about them at the earliest opportunity. Private Eye have covered this extensively and uncovered some truly worrying evidence of cover ups and court silencing behaviours across the NHS. Two things are needed to address this – an altering of the culture of secrecy in all public services, not just the NHS, but specifically for the NHS to be taken out of government control and handed to an independent, public sector body free of government interference with all the relevant powers of oversight and decision making capability. The government sets the budget but this commission, perhaps, makes the decisions. This will end the political blame culture that pervades every area of the public sector. We never look for ways to stop things happening, we look for people to sack when they finally go wrong. This is entirely reactive and unhelpful. On a similar line because so much money is spent on healthcare each new government wants to put its own stamp on the health service so you get change after change after change – no actual change is given chance to bed down to see if it works. The politics of the NHS is one of the things that may just kill the NHS – every government of the day wants to give it another heart transplant when the one it had might have been working fine, or at least getting better as time wore on. Roger Taylor’s solution to this genuine concern is, yes you guessed it, more private involvement.
At no stage does Taylor provide a coherent analysis of why bringing in a layer of shareholding profit makers would improve the health service. There are some interesting ideas of patient involvement in care, though the extent of this is somewhat worrying and seems to be just a way of removing liability for care, good or bad, from the would-be private institutions and onto the individual which strikes me as libertarianism gone mad. The NHS is not failing, it is improving. Some things need to improve quicker than they are doing but cutting funding in real terms and involving Richard Branson isn’t going to make anything better, it will make them worse. I accuse the author of writing a book purely to further his own private interests in making money out of the NHS and shamefully couching his argument in terms of patient care. I accuse the Guardian of aiding and abetting this miserable little tome for similar reasons – the Guardian Trust is no stranger to investing in odd ventures against the interests of the type of people who read their paper. God Bless the NHS is essentially literary cheerleading for the likes of Jeremy Hunt and Andrew Lansley before him, two men with whom the NHS should never have been trusted.
May 3, 2013
Very easy to read and I agreed with many of the conclusions in the last few chapters regarding more patient power, which, using his analysis and my personal feelings, seems like a positive way forward. I also thought the examples given of poor patient care to be relevant and poignant. There was a distinct lack of ideology here, which was refreshing.
However, I do wish the scope had been expanded to examine the possible consequences of the current reforms and the fact that a lot of people in the house of commons and house of lords have vested interests in these reforms and the fact that there is very little evidence to suggest that this particular form of privatization will have a positive impact for patients (i.e putting services on the market and making it law for this to be compulsory even if it is not in the best interests for patients).
All in all a very informative read for anyone interested in the NHS (that should be anyone who has ever used an NHS hospital or had loved ones there, which is pretty much everyone except probably the queen)
God bless people caring about caring
However, I do wish the scope had been expanded to examine the possible consequences of the current reforms and the fact that a lot of people in the house of commons and house of lords have vested interests in these reforms and the fact that there is very little evidence to suggest that this particular form of privatization will have a positive impact for patients (i.e putting services on the market and making it law for this to be compulsory even if it is not in the best interests for patients).
All in all a very informative read for anyone interested in the NHS (that should be anyone who has ever used an NHS hospital or had loved ones there, which is pretty much everyone except probably the queen)
God bless people caring about caring
December 26, 2016
This book gave me new insights into the NHS, the way it's evolving and where it developed from. It also opened my eyes to the many different perspectives of the NHS people have and why. I'm very grateful to have read this book because it forced me to critique my own POV of where the NHS should be headed.
March 29, 2013
Very easy to read, intelligent, a good analysis of where we are and some pointers to what we can do about it.
April 23, 2013
An interesting read. Some really constructive ideas on healthcare
June 7, 2013
Brilliantly explains the complex challenges in a simple, easy to digest way.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews