Not Another Mid-Staffs
The Minister for Health and News Corporation, Jeremy C Hunt, has had nothing to say about the failures of BMI Healthcare in its Mount Alvernia hospital. He had nothing at all to say about whether the failures at Mount Alvernia represented failures in private healthcare as a whole; he had nothing at all to say about whether dozens or hundreds of Mount Alvernias might be conducting bare-hands surgery all over the country; he had nothing at all to say about a culture of callousness and inefficiency in the private sector, despite the glittering examples of Network Rail, G4S, ATOS Healthcare, Serco, Southern Cross and so many others. However, as time and opportunity allows, the Minister for Health and News Corporation may possibly get around to blaming the NHS for encouraging the abuses at Mount Alvernia by referring patients there at all.
2 Comments:
At 6:48 pm ,
Anonymous said...
I think you mean Railtrack, not Network Rail.
Major's government created Railtrack as a a public sector body that they promised not to privatise until suddenly one day they did. Railtrack was thus a private monopoly in charge of a national asset, 95% of railway lines in the country. It was ugrading the mainline out of Euston without a coherent plan, burning public money, and did not have a clear record of the state of its assets (except the property it wanted to flog off). For reasons that remain unclear, the good news that it was going to be killed off was considered by New Labour to be bad news that had to be buried.
Guano
At 12:07 am ,
Philip said...
You may well be right. I thought they just changed the name to Network Rail, but no doubt it was more complicated and less sensible than that.
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