[NetBehaviour] Dr Hairy in: Big.Data, part 2

[Edward Picot]

Joel -

Don't get me started on the NHS. Of course the Tories are predisposed 
towards selling things off and bringing in more and more private 
provision in the interests of "efficiency" and "introducing competition 
into the healthcare market" - they think that privatisation and the 
competition are the answers to everything, basically - and they're 
particularly keen on the idea that a lot of healthcare problems can be 
solved by introducing lots and lots of extra screening and 
vaccination/medication programmes, because screening can be done by lots 
of non-NHS agencies (such as pharmacies) and vaccination/medication 
programmes put vast amounts of money in the pockets of their chums in 
the pharmaceuticals industry. (As an aside, it's quite comical to see 
how desperate both the Government and the pharmaceuticals industry are 
to find some evidence that "vaping" is bad for your health, since at the 
moment it's starting to look like a far more effective way to give up 
smoking than any tablet or nicotine patch the drugs industry has managed 
to come up with, which means that a huge loss of profits is on the 
cards.) However, the direction of travel has been the same under both 
the Tories and Labour - the pace of change may be different, and so may 
the way it's dressed up, but basically they both perceive the problem in 
the same terms and seem to be looking at the same limited range of 
solutions. Keep the punters out of hospital at any cost - dismantle the 
hospitals and move care out of the hospitals into small clinics, GPs' 
surgeries and the wider care community as much as you can.

As someone who works in the NHS, the depressing thing is that once every 
few years we get the "biggest reform of the NHS for a generation", which 
means a dramatic rebuilding exercise and a period of exhausting chaos 
and uncertainty; and when we start to emerge from the other end of the 
process and things begin to settle down a bit (which is where we are 
now) it's only to discover than none of the savings the reorganisation 
was supposed to deliver have actually materialised, the projected 
overspend is still pretty much the same as it was before, and therefore 
the arseholes in Government and the Department of Health are starting to 
eye up yet another huge smash-and-rebuild exercise.

Grrr....

- Edward