Safe In Our Hands

If memory serves, hospital cleaners were among the first NHS services to be contracted out, in the name of increased efficiency and better patient care through the sterilising prism of competition and private enterprise. Doubtless it all works well enough for the right sort of people.

In other health sales news, those medically-qualified asylum seekers who have somehow slithered under the barricades are being prevented from practising their trade because they cannot afford to register. Since the Government cut off funding two years ago, hospitals have been forced to charge doctors for "unsalaried work experience", thus efficiently preventing many highly qualified people from contributing their necessary skills. Doctors are unable to pay for the privilege of working in the NHS, from which funding has been withdrawn so those doctors who could make up the staff shortfall cannot be paid. Meanwhile, the shortfall is helping to lower the standards of care which the Government will soon be using as an excuse to close more hospitals. The sheer Britishness of the arrangement verges upon the sublime.