New Regulatory Bodies for health professionals?

Jeremy Hunt has just produced a White Paper on simplifying the regulatory machinery for health professionals – again. This, on the same day that figures emerged showing that the NHS has failed to meet waiting targets for A&E:

• 82% of patient were transferred or discharged within 4 hours of arriving in A&E compared to the target of 95%;
• 60,000 spent between 4 and 12 hours waiting more than 12 hours trolleys in A&E corridors
• 780 people waited more than 12 hours for a bed.

This is the worst performance since the targets were introduced in 2004.
And its worth remembering that each of these 780 is actually a sick person needing hospital level care.

The BMA, the head of the Royal College of GPs, the head of the Royal College of Surgeons: all have expressed – this week -their concern that the NHS is facing crippling pressures. And what does the government do:  it orders a review of the royal college regulatory machinery!

Proposing a review of regulatory machinery is not cost free. It costs money to ‘review existing arrangements’. Senior staff have to make time to read the proposals, consult with colleagues, write responses, when they could be contributing that same time to patient care. They are already using their administrative time to try to improve the way their services function by better integrating services locally. And so these proposals also increase ‘opportunity costs’ – the costs of not doing one thing to do another – adding even more to the time pressures experienced by already over-burdened health professionals.

This Mad Hatter of a Health Secretary is doing everything he can to ignore what seasoned – and long suffering – health professionals are pointing out is a crisis in health care provision. We are simply not providing sufficient resources to tackle the problems we are facing.  This week a new category of health personnel was invented:  ‘corridor nurse’.  Surely it is clear that we do not have enough people to do the jobs we are demanding of them in the NHS today.  One Junior Doctor is quoted today as saying he is ‘falling down with exhaustion’ – and he isn’t alone.

Is this really what we as patients, as taxpayers, as citizens want? An Ipsos/Mori poll out this week reported that more than 2 in 5 people would pay more taxes to fund the NHS.  Fifty-three percent – more than voted to Leave the EU – favour increasing National Insurance payments to increase NHS resources.

So, why are we waiting? And what are we waiting for?  These problems can’t wait for Brexit to be sorted out.  They need tackling now.  Call your MP; do everything you can to help Mrs May see the problems she is missing, veiled by Brexit and an overly optimistic Health Secretary.