If Jeremy Hunt ran his own business

Any company boss who rides roughshod through employees’ genuine concerns and wishes is unlikely to survive for long in business.  It may well be that he/she will effect a temporary improvement in the company’s bottom line, but eventually the business will see a downturn in its fortunes.  Such downturn will occur through a reduction in employee morale, a lowering of the ‘health and happiness’ index, poor staff retention, an inability to recruit or a combination of all four.

So why, in this enlightened age of employer responsibility, is a man who has a series of failed businesses and departments behind him allowed to ride roughshod through the lifeblood of the NHS?

How can David Cameron maintain support of a person who purports to have skills in Public Relations, but who has woefully failed to demonstrate those skills in his short political life?

As a sound bite, “7 day National Health Service” is bound to attract support from a public whose faith in the NHS has been eroded by mismanagement, insufficient funding and reduced services.  But look deeper into the sound bite: the Headline destined for the Redtops, and you will find flawed logic, lies and misinformation.

The NHS already runs seven days a week, or should I be more accurate and confirm that ‘junior’ doctors already run the NHS  seven days a week.  It is true that there are probably not enough support facilities available – scans, X-rays, blood tests etc., and maybe there is a demand for weekend consultants’ clinics.  However, such demand is possibly fuelled by the desire of some patients not to intrude on their work time, so the inevitable result is an intrusion into someone else’s non-work time, let’s call it ‘anti-social time’.

So what is this “7 day National Health Service” all about, if ‘junior’ doctors already contribute to staffing the NHS for seven days a week.  Clearly it’s about squeezing seven days into a five day a week budget by reducing the periods referred to as ‘anti-social.’

In order for that to happen, the NHS managers have created shift patterns for ‘junior’ doctors that are unsafe.  They include leave days that are squeezed in between night or late shifts, together with several weekend day and weekend night shifts in sequence.  The shift requirements in many cases are just debilitating.  A worn out doctor is an unsafe doctor and an unsafe doctor creates an unsafe NHS.

You will also find that many aspects of the imposed ‘junior’ doctors’ contract openly defy other principles set out by the UK Government, in terms of equality and non-discrimination.  But Jeremy Hunt’s response appears to be that this is acceptable collateral damage.  ‘Cost effectiveness’, the Government’s excuse for swingeing cuts, is put forward as the reason for the proposed changes.  I believe they should look at another policy that is doing the rounds at the moment ‘Social Value’.

What is the negative value to the country of producing a demoralised, ineffective, broken National Health Service?  Because that is what will become of Hunt’s insistence that he is right and everyone else is wrong!