Tuesday 11 August 2009

No waiting lists? Oh dear Burnham as swine flu misdiagnosis kills



Andy Burnham may be a nice bloke in his private life, he may enjoy football, but at the end of the day he is still an incompetent fool who has been caught with his pants down time and time again. Not only has Mr Burnham been caught telling untruths in Parliament on medical issues, he is now peddling utter bullshit as fact in many areas of health policy.

To be fair to Burnham he may not be being deliberately dishonest here, he appears more like a stupid schoolboy who is way out of his depth. The problems with Tamiflu are blatant, it's benefits are mild at best, while its negatives may well outweigh them. The whole Swine flu business smells very much of a useless government pretending to be doing something when it would be better off doing nothing and reassuring people.

The useless and completely dangerous swine flu hotline is not something new for this government, empowering the uneducated is a real hallmark of this government. As many of us predicted deaths are resulting from lethal septic episodes that have been assumed to be swine flu by the undertrained diagnosticians that have been empowered by our cretinous politicians.

The truth is that swine flu is a pretty benign disease, we would be much better off without any stupid NHS call centres manned by numpties, everyone should just go about things as normal unless they become unwell. The unwell then need to be assessed by those with appropriate training, ie medical degrees and experience in medicine. This lame duck of a government had a massive stockpile of useless tablets and wanted to become popular by being seen to be doing something, unfortunately it is doing more harm than good in its misguided attempts to interfere when no interference would be the less harmful option.

Burnham also seems to think waiting lists are a thing of the past. I would like to remind him that this is a complete lie. Waiting lists are alive and well, in fact the 18 weeks target for surgery is resulting in clinical need being thrown out of the window. Because of the blanket targets the most minor and non urgent of surgery is given a disproportionate amount of influence, this results in the more urgent clinical need of others being ignored in favour of elective surgery. This government doesn't seem to realise that rearranging the deckchairs doesn't magically create more deckchairs. So frankly Mr Burnham I don't care if you're a nice bloke when stoking the barbie on your sundays off, your work as health minister stinks and you are blatantly out of your depth.

Monday 3 August 2009

Morons, swines, cretins and fools


These are the people that run the NHS and that waste ridiculous amounts of money on various useless harebrained schemes that are usually aimed at pretending to do something rather than actually doing anything of any use. The swine flu drama has encapsulated just how utterly pathetic the people are who run and managed the health service from the very top.

Swine flu is a a disease which differs little from severity from several winter viruses, but the English NHS is behaving as if we are in the middle of an Ebloa epidemic. Call centre operatives are making diagnoses on the basis of no training at all, indeed one can even dispense with the call centre and simply diagnose oneself on-line - they are then dispensing a drug of uncertain benefit, but with known side effects and with a documented ability to produce resistance, 'prescribed' by either a computer or a call centre operative with no discernible medical training or skill.

As I have read elsewhere it is rather obvious that many people will have died and will die due to various untrained and uneducated people assuming that every febrile illness is swine flu, thus people who are unfortunate enough to get a severe case of meningitis, urosepsis, cholangitis, endocarditis, and on and on will just be left at home to die because it's 'probably swine flu'. Stories of various patients being refused hospital admission by those without medical degrees with febrile illnesses which were clearly not swine flu are already coming to light. Various numpties have been empowered to diagnose swine flu, who needs doctors? Well, no one does if you would rather die.

This little story also captured my imagination, the DOH is commissioning management consultants KPMG to report on a vision for a digital strategy for the NHS. Well, whoopeedoo, why not waste more money on reviewing just how many completely useless schemes you can come up with to compliment NHS Direct and NHS Choices while diverting more money away from the frontline services that actually make a difference to patients.

I will review NHS Direct and NHS Choices for free, the former is a dangerous waste of money while the latter is more of a plain waste of money. The sad thing is that both the Tories and Labour want to continue to develop this market of madness which simply involves around paying off various big companies to generate more useless NHS bureaucracy that does sod all of any good for patients. What hope is there for the NHS, there is no choice for voters, we are doomed either way.