How we love “Our NHS”!

 

Firstly, I want to thank you all for your kind ‘get-better-soon’ messages, here on the site and in your private emails which I’ll try and answer today and tomorrow. I’m somewhat restored, but as all who battle with chronic illnesses know – there are ups and downs and a status of perfect health, as in ‘before’, is not achievable. ‘KBO’ has become a personal as well as a general mantra.

Secondly – these ‘days off’, with strict abstinence from the MSM (alright: I did scan the headlines, sorry), have allowed me to take a step back and look at the larger picture. It’s not a pretty one. Moreover, it’s become quite obvious that ‘Our MSM’ are both incapable and unwilling to ask the questions which ought to be asked. Instead, they are driven by the self-inflicted, breathless “News Cycle”, producing snippets of so-called ‘info’, either using tweets or pre-packaged PR material from various institutions, no questions asked. As long as someone calls themselves an ‘expert’, as long as there’s some sort of professional institution in the background, their utterances are taken at face value. 

For example, in this morning’s Times there’s a piece titled “Coronavirus can spread through hospital ward in ten hours” (link, paywalled). Briefly, researchers left a millilitre of water containing non-infectious viral CV-19 DNA on one bed in an isolation room and found that same viral DNA ten hours later at 41% ‘of the sites’ in the hospital. Surely, more Lockdown is now needed? And more research? More money?

The researchers conclude that this material could be removed with disinfectant and hand washing. Ah. So why didn’t the authors of that article point out that perhaps the hygiene in this and NHS hospitals generally is not as stellar as it should be? Shouldn’t they have asked why there weren’t squads of cleaners disinfecting everything in sight? Weren’t there tens of thousands of volunteers at the early Lockdown stages, willing to help?

Perhaps such simple, common-sense observation isn’t suitable for the MSM-War against “The Government”, against Johnson. After all, the PM surely must be responsible that there hasn’t been ‘government guidance’ for the proper disinfection of hospital wards!

Rest assured, the next lot of professionals are already standing ready to wade in. There’s this juicy article in the DT, headlined: “Why we need a post-crisis mental health task force – Lockdown has led to a ‘perfect storm’ of mental health problems – now experts are demanding action” (link). It’s about all the Lockdowners whose mental health has been affected: they need help from professionals, and thus money is needed. At least the authors acknowledge that there’s not much money, so it just needs to be ‘differently distributed’. Funny how these professional bodies seem incapable of working out a collaborative scheme within the NHS – they are, after all, part of it.

While this plea is reasonably humble, the GPs are also raising their concerns. The Times reports the demand of the BMA, the GP’s ‘Trade Union’: “Make patients wear masks at all our surgeries, GPs urge” (link, paywalled). If you thought the complaint is about preventing the virus from spreading – think again. This is a complaint that ‘some NHS Trusts haven’t been consulted’ and neither have the GPs when the government announced last week that face masks must be worn in hospitals. The chairman of the BMA said:

“If we are to have confidence in the government’s ability to deliver on this, […] they must be forthcoming immediately on how this will work.” He said that while many GP practices had reduced face-to-face consultations, “encouraging patients to wear a face covering when attending a practice will help further protect staff and patients”.” (link, paywalled)

In other words – the PM must consult GPs first and then tell them what to do, providing ‘guidance for all’. We can’t have single GPs doing things by themselves, can we! Not in the NHS, nor in medical organisations: one size must fit all, and there must be more commissions and more money for them. Using private initiative is ‘verboten’. 

There’s another opinion piece, from some Lords, which The Times also helpfully published. This has the title “NHS needs ‘reserve’ capacity to deal with future crises” (link, paywalled). The lords’ demand is based on a survey taken by the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the findings of that survey, while concerning, end of course in the now familiar plea:

“The pandemic has laid bare the underinvestment in the health and social care sector over many years. Infection control and social distancing cannot take place in overcrowded hospitals who have to resort to “corridor care” because of a lack of beds. Post-pandemic, there is a real opportunity to rethink our health and social care sector, so that it meets the requirements of a truly 21st-century healthcare system.” (link, paywalled)

For ‘re-think’ read ‘Our NHS needs more money or we’re all gonna die!’ The closures of many local hospitals, sold to us under ‘a centralised system will give stellar healthcare by stellar specialists’ is forgotten. The scandal of care homes and the clearing out of the elderly of NHS hospitals to ‘make room’ for COVD-19 patients is forgotten.

Isn’t it strange that those who demand ‘more money’ are so reluctant to take a closer look at where so much of NHS ‘money’ is being wasted! There was one article though in the DT yesterday where the famous quango PHE was given a bit of limelight, under the innocuous looking headline “PHE’s inability to deliver mass testing delayed easing of lockdown” (link).

We remember the twisting and turning of PHE on this issue, thus many readers will have just read that headline, nodded, and gone on to read something else. There are however some astounding bits of info – which, to no-one’s surprise, have not been taken up at all, for example:

“Three and a half weeks after the measures came in, Public Health England (PHE) said it remained unable to deliver a community testing programme for Covid, which could allow ministers to ease social distancing rules, documents show. The failings emerged alongside evidence suggesting PHE may have misled the Prime Minister when questioned about their testing regime. […] The minutes from a meeting of SAGE [show] scientists pressed health officials on the importance of such a regime, to allow informed decision-making. But PHE refused to take on the work – so it was not until April 17 that the Office for National Statistics was asked to instead take it on.” (link) [my emphasis]

It is obviously of no importance that the PM, blamed by the combined MSM for everything, especially for following or not ‘Teh Science’, was given misleading information by PHE, nor that even the sages of SAGE didn’t receive the information they asked for. I don’t expect this devastating critique to be taken up in the MSM – it doesn’t fit the narratives of Johnson needing to be got rid of and ‘Our Sacred Cow’ being blameless. You might like to read the comment posts under that article …

PHE is coming under fire from another professional body. It’s not about money. This time it’s serious (I’m not joking!). The Times reports: “PHE report into coronavirus impact on ethnic minorities a ‘failure of leadership’, say black doctors” (link, paywalled). So – not ‘more money’, or not quite yet, but ‘leadership’ – in what, you might well ask! This:

“The doctors’ letter, addressed to the health secretary Matt Hancock and the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch and seen by The Times, said: “We have long been aware of ethnic disparities in health outcomes; sadly, this review does nothing to further our understanding, and we must express our profound disappointment. It does rather demonstrate to us the failure of visible leadership that will engage and reform the institutional racism that Sir Simon Stevens [chief executive of the NHS in England] has referred to.” It is signed by the British Medical Association and more than two dozen groups representing doctors from Ghanaian, Nigerian, Somali, Iraqi, Cameroonian and other backgrounds. The letter criticised the PHE study for lacking data on ethnic minority workers’ occupations, and omitting any discussion of the role of discrimination and racism.” (link, paywalled)

Ah – use ‘institutional racism’ and any common-sense assessments go out of the window. I wonder if those doctors, so aware of ‘ethnic disparities in health outcomes’, have done anything about it, like actual research. I also wonder why this lot of doctors don’t make any proposals as to how to combat this alleged ‘institutional racism’, never mind showing where it occurs in “Our NHS”. Surely they must have data? Perhaps they just want that CEO of NHS England to ‘take the knee’, as apparently our metropolitan police force did … I finally wonder if there will be some sort of report on the fact that more white males died of CV-19 than other groups … nah, am not holding my breath …

So what have I learned in the few days I had time to reflect? That ‘Our MSM’ are not going to give up on their narrative of “Johnson bad – he must go” and that, in order to keep this going, they busily disregard anything at all which might interfere with their warfare. Labour is still absent without anyone mentioning Starmer. ‘Our NHS’ must get more money without anyone looking at the economic disaster looming ever more on the horizon. Brexit can be disregarded because with Johnson gone Brexit can be scuppered, so keep quiet about this because Leavers must not be riled up. Above all, keep the Lockdown going, never mind that the various demos over the weekend have broken those rules for all to see, with no police interference. I wonder who will be blamed should there be a ‘new spike’ in the next week … 

When I try to fit those puzzle pieces into a whole picture, it looks more and more as if the main aim of the MSM and the Westminster ‘elite’ is to transform our society into North Korea on Thames, with the economy geared to one thing only: to run and sustain ‘Our NHS. ‘Tis not a pretty picture …

 

KBO!

 

Photo by tubblesnap

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