Little Red Riding Hood

Little red riding rood once had to deliver a parcel of food to her poor sick grandmother. She had to negotiate her way through the woods in order to get to her grandmother's house, but there was a big bad wolf that wanted to digest her, however he was afraid of doing so in public, so he approached her to find out where she was going, she naively spilt the beans...

The wolf beat her to the house, tricked little red's grandmother into letting her into her house, ate her and dressed up in the grandmother's clothes, then lay in wait for little red riding hood. Little red arrived a little later and was swallowed whole.

Luckily for little red a hunter came to her rescue and cut the wolf open to free both little red and her grandmother, all ended happily with the wolf being killed off by some large stones.

Incidentally Darzi's review was released today proclaiming 'Change – locally-led, patient-centred and clinically driven', maybe it's just me, but the very same government that has been wasting billions on centrally controlled, politician centred and politically driven health care reform appears to be very much in control of this one, while the calls for more 'personalised' care driven forward in an 'accelerated' manner looks like a wolf hiding in a 'quality' sheepskin jacket to me.

I fail to see how any of the following will improve 'quality': undermining high standards in medical training, allowing more private sector cherry picking, allowing more money to be wasted by PCTs on healthy lifestyle guff, more quangos, more reorganisation with no accountability, more inaccurate measurement of care quality by the use of patient satisfaction surveys (remember the botched ISTC jobs) and more care delivered by workers with lower levels of education and training than ever before. I could go on but you get the picture of our hairy and rather toothy bedfellow.

The medical profession is in the woods. The big bad wolf is ready and waiting, our grandmother is long gone and probably in the terminal ileum by now. Do we naively believe all we are told or do we get ready to hunt our wolf, the choice is yours.