Good Opinions

Daveybloke's latest wheeze on curing Britain of the hated National Health Service has come a bit of a cropper. The basic idea was to outsource the Government's NHS-bashing to patients by carrying out satisfaction surveys, the results of which would be recorded as negative or neutral unless respondents said they were "extremely likely" to recommend a service. A report commissioned by the Department for Profitable Healthcare noted with commendable restraint that "if the public are to engage with this measure, the scoring mechanism does need to be simple, readily explainable and seen as credible". One would hardly think this sort of thing could be beyond a jumped-up PR junior like Daveybloke, particularly when he has the famously adroit Minister for Health and News Corporation, Jeremy C Hunt, to back him up, not to mention the Ghost of Little Ivan; but it seems that Bullingdon crudity has once again won out over soft-sell subtlety. Indeed, the whole process is so crassly manipulative that even the New Labour drone Randy Burnham, who once suggested turning public libraries into leisure centres with on-site GP surgeries, has registered awareness. A spokesbeing for the Government said that recording too many favourable results as favourable would have shown a majority of NHS trusts in a favourable light, which obviously could not be allowed.