Happy Birthday NHS

The NHS is 70 today - we had a tea party at work, although I could only stay for five minutes, as I had to cross site for a meeting. This is one of the many corridors. I found the light interesting, and have tweaked for blue light as a tribute to the NHS. Because it made me think of the modern NHS. Think of the care and compassion given as the light, and the shadow as the finances. The amount of space for care is under constant assault from the lack of funding. This particularly building is relatively new, but many are very old, propped up and painted to hide the issues. It is harder to give the level of care in older buildings:
- if the ward is old style, it may not have sufficient space to safely prepare medicines or for procedures, it may not have sufficient space for the equipment needed
- Computer systems are under constant assault from virus attacks, and Trusts often can't afford good quality computers to allow efficient working.
- There are constant medical advances, but these cost money to train and implement, new tools, new equipment, new technology, not to mention the cost of new drugs. No one wants to ration healthcare, but no Trust can afford it all.
- Some services nationally have more patients than there are trained experts to care and monitor their conditions. Sometimes its about training more, but these require a an ability to learn skills that not everyone can achieve.

And through all of this, the NHS is made to spend additional money training and employing people to compete for the contracts for work which was done safely and efficiently because private providers want to cream off the parts of the service which can be operated at a profit. They don't want elderly care, or stroke services, they want to charge the NHS to deliver little packets of services, so we then have to spend more time and money making agreements and chasing down pathways between little bits everywhere, and yet if something goes wrong - the NHS has to pay out for the investigation and take the blame, regardless of the faults in any of the private providers involved. And the solicitors won't try and claim from the private providers - they will go after money from the NHS, because its bigger.

So I am very proud to work for this organisation, but can be frustrated at how we are increasingly asked to add more and more handicaps into our ability to deliver a first class service.

And just to point out - the NHS is the safest healthcare service in the world. We monitor errors more closely than any other healthcare organisation world wide, and are far more proactive in looking for solutions to reduce those risks than any other. In 1999, Harvard professors pointed out that the starting point of safety was a national database of errors. The NHS implemented that in 2004. The US still has an ad hoc network of some regional databases, but not everywhere, not all providers, and certainly not national.